Deforestation: Correlations, Possible Causes and Some Implications

Changes in national forest areas during 1990-2000 are contrasted with other variables to illustrate correlations and provoke discussion about possible causes. Twenty-five statistically-significant correlations (including rural population, life expectancy, GDP, literacy, commerce, agriculture, poverty and inflation) are illustrated and a statistical model suggests that good governance, alternative employment opportunities, and payments for environmental services may be effective in combating deforestation. The data suggest that a global forest convention may need to be supported by substantial and carefully-targeted development assistance to foster good governance

APLIKASI MANAJEMEN RESIKO DARI PERSEPSI PARA STAKEHOLDERS (STUDI KASUS PROYEK PEMBANGUNAN JALAN TOL SEMARANG-SOLO SEKSI I RUAS TEMBALANG-GEDAWANG)

ABSTRACT Risk of construction are borned by many parties in a project. Generally, risks are identified just from the owner and contractor, some other sides are also involved in that project. The aim of this research is to analyse the application of risk management in the highway project from stakeholders’ perception. the objective of this research is to analyse the risks of Semarang-Solo highway project section I (Tembalang-Gedawang) from the stakeholders’ perception in the project, such as contractor, owner, planner consultant, supervisory consultant, and society around this project. The second objective is to know the comprehensive risk management from stakeholders’ perception. The third objective is to compare risk analysis method among Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS) method and Analythical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The fourth objective is to analyse the sensitivity of risk to the change of policy of each stakeholder. Primary data were taken through the interviews, then processed using RBS and AHP method. RBS risk analysis was done by multiplying the value of the impact and frequency to obtain the value of the risk level of each risk factor. AHP risk analysis was done by calculating eigen values and consistency test to get value of risk probability and risk impact, then multiplied them to get the value of risk level. Risk analysis is conducted to all stakeholders, to obtain the comprehensive risk analysis at this project. This risk analysis can be taken to the risk sensitivity analysis to know risk sensitivity at this project from the change of policy by each stakeholder. This research found that the risk of Semarang-Solo highway project section I (Tembalang- Gedawang) are different in each stakeholders’ perception. The result of risk analysis with RBS and AHP method at each stakeholder is also different. Those differences are also seen at the difference of risk ranking, because the instruments of questionnaires at RBS methode are easier for respondents than the instruments of questionnaires at AHP method. From the whole risk of the project, the biggest risk from all stakeholders by RBS method is construction risk, but the biggest risk from AHP method is economic risk. The results of risk sensitivity analysis show that the contractor risk is sensitive when it changed from 0,48 to 0,10 and 0,70. Supervisory consultant risk is sensitive when it changed from 0,19 to 1,20 but the planner consultant risk is sensitive when it changed from 0,11 to 0,40. The risk of both society and owner are not sensitive with any change. This concludes that the risk ranking of both stakeholders are consistent. Keywords: construction risk, project stakeholders, Risk Breakdown Structure, Analythical Hierarchy Process, risk sensitivity analysi

Deforestation mechanism: a survey

Numerous published economic models of tropical deforestation are reviewed, in four categories: - a Neo-Malthusian approach, often nebulous and imprecise in terms of causal processes, which sees population pressure as the underlying cause of tropical deforestation; - those focusing on government failures - particularly on misdirected government policies in other sectors that result in excessive and inappropriate deforestation; sectoral (e.g. log export ban) policies; and the general failure of supervisory institutions of governance, including corruption. This approach puts great emphasis on the effects of government interventions; - a microeconomic approach which considers the economic rationality of forest clearance from a farmer's perspective, and explains how various forms of market failure, e.g. poorly defined property rights, poorly-designed logging contracts and undervaluation of forest benefits at the local, regional or global level, all contribute to deforestation; and - a macroeconomic emphasis which explores the alleged links between debt and deforestation, leading to debt-for-nature swaps being proposed as a means for reducing deforestation rate in developing countries. The authors conclude that both the government failures and micro-economic analyses are particularly relevant to understanding current deforestation processes and policy options in Indonesia

Deforestation and capital accumulation: lessons from the Upper Kerinci region, Indonesia

This study outlines a case where the behaviour of farmers in accumulating capital, rather than their poverty as commonly assumed, results in deforestation. Fieldwork was undertaken in the Upper Kerinci region of the island of Sumatera, Indonesia. A financial analysis of the "net income" streams received by farmers from deforestation is performed. Because forest lands can be "captured " and privatised through clearing and the subsequent agriculture have the capacity to produce high financial returns for farmers as well as to provide adequate capital to finance the next forest clearing. Such a capacity enables landless farmers to become land owners. Forest clearing also enables farmers to own a "long-term maturity bond" in the form of a cinnamon plantation. Poverty precludes poorer farmers from deforestation, and decisions to clear a forest rest mostly with more established farmers. Financial surpluses from outside the forestry and agricultural sectors are also used to finance forest clearing

Effects of Live Load on Seismic Response of Bridges: A Preliminary Study

Although live load is well known to have a dynamic effect on bridge response in addition to its self-weight, the significance of these effects on seismic response is unclear. In addition, most bridge design specifications have few requirements concerning the inclusion of live load in their seismic design provisions. The main objective of this study is therefore to investigate and obtain insight into the effect of vehicle-bridge interaction during earthquake shaking. The study consists of both experimental and analytical investigations. This paper focuses on the experimental work, which includes shake table testing of a 2/5-scale model of a horizontally curved steel girder bridge loaded with a series of representative vehicles. Preliminary experimental results show that the presence of the live load had a clear beneficial effect on performance for small amplitude motions, but that this improvement diminished with increasing amplitude of shaking. Parameters used to measure performance include column displacements, abutment shear forces, abutment uplift, and concrete spalling

Characterization of the LIGO detectors during their sixth science run

In 2009-2010, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) operated together with international partners Virgo and GEO600 as a network to search for gravitational waves (GWs) of astrophysical origin. The sensitivity of these detectors was limited by a combination of noise sources inherent to the instrumental design and its environment, often localized in time or frequency, that couple into the GW readout. Here we review the performance of the LIGO instruments during this epoch, the work done to characterize the detectors and their data, and the effect that transient and continuous noise artefacts have on the sensitivity of LIGO to a variety of astrophysical sources

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press