Measuring and Explaining the Productive Efficiency of Tax Offices. a Non-Parametric Best Practice Frontier Approach

In this paper we mimic an engineeriilg approach to the "production" of tax offices. Essentially one dominant physical input (labour) is converted into heterogeneous non-monetary outputs such as theNumber of audited returns with a different degree of complexity. Productive efficiency is evaluated against a best practice frontier using the non-parametric Free Disposal (FDH) method and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We first calculate efficiency measures for 289 regional tax offices, responsible for the personal income tax in Belgium. Next we explain the differences in efficiency scores in terms of characteristics related to managerial skills/culture and organizational structures.

“Pest Forests”, “Utility Forests” and “Cow Bends”

Small and scattered patches of forests contrast sharply within the context of the flat and monotonous dark green pastures in the Dutch polder landscapes. These patches, with various types of trees, are like little islands, surrounded by ditches. They are not remnants of the original old peat swamp forests but farmers created the patches in the past for particular purposes. Their names offer clear indications: in addition to the general name of ‘small polder forests’ (polderbosjes) they are called ‘pest forests’ (pestbosjes or krengenbosjes, places where contaminated or dead animals were dumped), ‘farmers’ utility or coppice forests’ (boerengeriefhoutbosjes or hakhoutbosjes, from which farmers collected all types of useful wood), or ‘cow bends or milk forests’ (koebochten or melkbosjes, places where the cows were milked and where the manure could be collected). With the modernization of agriculture and alternative sources of energy, many of these forest islands have been cleared for the sake of expanding the pastures. However, increasingly these forest patches are also viewed from a different perspective. Nowadays they are valued as an important element in the country’s (agri)cultural heritage, but also for the role they play in terms of the polders’ biodiversity (flora as well as fauna), which has rapidly declined with the modernization of agriculture in recent decades. In this article an overview will be given of the origin of these ‘forest islands’ and how they have functioned in the Dutch polder landscape in the past century as an often ignored aspect of farmers’ knowledge and practices. Attention will also be paid to the present efforts to maintain these forest islands

Frightened by the eagle; Recording songs and music from the Island of Siberut, Mentawai Islands

Singing is the most important element of the traditional music culture on Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands (West Sumatra, Indonesia). There are various types of songs on the island. Some of them are related to the world of spirits and ancestors. These are mainly sung by shamans during healing ceremonies and rituals. Other songs are made up by men and women during their daily activities, when they are fishing out at sea or when they take a rest from collecting forest products. Various animals (birds, primates, reptiles) or natural forces (wind, thunder) provide inspiration for lyrics and melodies, as do special events, like the arrival of a logging company on the island). In this article, we discuss the process of recording the songs and other types of music of the island and the production of two CDs and the reactions of the singers and the community to the presentation of the CDs. In a context of decades of suppression of various aspects of the traditional culture (religion, tattoo, loincloth) documentation of a form of intangible culture and its positive appreciation can generate a sense of pride among a local community. In addition, we have added an extensive appendix to this article containing the lyrics of a number of songs in both the local language as well as in translation. It allows readers to get an idea of the poetic nature of the song literature of the Mentawaians

A Sensitivity Study of the Enceladus Torus

We have developed a homogeneous model of physical chemistry to investigate the neutral-dominated, water-based Enceladus torus. Electrons are treated as the summation of two isotropic Maxwellian distributions$-$a thermal component and a hot component. The effects of electron impact, electron recombination, charge exchange, and photochemistry are included. The mass source is neutral H$_2$O, and a rigidly-corotating magnetosphere introduces energy via pickup of freshly-ionized neutrals. A small fraction of energy is also input by Coulomb collisions with a small population ($<$ 1%) of supra-thermal electrons. Mass and energy are lost due to radial diffusion, escaping fast neutrals produced by charge exchange and recombination, and a small amount of radiative cooling. We explore a constrained parameter space spanned by water source rate, ion radial diffusion, hot-electron temperature, and hot-electron density. The key findings are: (1) radial transport must take longer than 12 days; (2) water is input at a rate of 100--180 kg s$^{-1}$; (3) hot electrons have energies between 100 and 250 eV; (4) neutrals dominate ions by a ratio of 40:1 and continue to dominate even when thermal electrons have temperatures as high as $\approx$ 5 eV; (5) hot electrons do not exceed 1% of the total electron population within the torus; (6) if hot electrons alone drive the observed longitudinal variation in thermal electron density, then they also drive a significant variation in ion composition.Comment: 9 pages text, 3 tables, 9 figure

Cryo-FIB Machining: An Alternative to TEM Cryo-Sections Cut with Diamonds?

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, August 7-August 11, 201

Simulating the Role of Axial Flow in Stay Cable Vibrations via a Perforated Wake Splitter Plate”, ASCE Special Edition: Wind Engineering in Natural Hazards

Cable-stayed bridges have become progressively popular since 1955, mainly because of their modest requirement on ground anchorage condition, efficient use of structural material, higher stiffness, and economy compared to suspension bridges. The inclined and/or yawed orientation of bridge stay cables results in the formation of secondary axial flow on the leeward side of cable surface, which is believed to be one of the contributing factors exciting some unique wind-induced cable vibration phenomena. To clarify the role of axial flow in triggering aerodynamic instability of stay cables, a numerical study has been conducted to indirectly examine the axial flow effect via a perforated splitter plate placed along the central line of a circular cylinder wake. Results show that the presence of a perforated wake splitter plate would play a similar role as the axial flow in affecting the strength of von Kármán vortex shedding. Reductions on the fluctuating amplitude of the instantaneous lift and drag, as well as the mean drag, are also observed, which would ultimately affect the aerodynamic response of the studied cylinder

Upwelling O+ ion source characteristics

Recent observations from the Dynamics Explorer 1 (DE-1) spacecraft have shown that the dayside auroral zone is an important source of very low-energy superthermal O^+ ions for the polar magnetosphere. When observed at 2000- to 5000-km altitude, the core of the O^+ distribution exhibits transverse heating to energies on the order of 10 eV, significant upward heat flux, and subsonic upward flow at significant flux levels exceeding 10^8 cm^{-2}s^{-1}. The term "upwelling ions" has been adopted to label these flows, which stand out in sharp contrast to the light ion polar wind flows observed in the same altitude range in the polar cap and subauroral magnetosphere. We have chosen a typical upwelling ion event for detailed study, correlating retarding ion mass spectrometer observations of the low-energy plasma with energetic ion observations and local electromagnetic field observations. The upwelling ion signature is colocated with the magnetospheric cleft as marked by precipitating energetic magnetosheath ions. The apparent ionospheric heating is clearly linked with the magnetic field signatures of strong field-aligned currents in the vicinity of the dayside polar cap boundary. Electric field and ion plasma measurements indicate that a very strong and localized convection channel or jet exists coincident with the other signatures of this event. These observations indicate that transverse ion heating to temperatures on the order of 10^5 K in the 2000- to 5000-km ionosphere is an important factor in producing heavy ion outflows into the polar magnetosphere. This result contrasts with recent suggestions that electron heating to temperatures of order 10^4 K is the most important parameter with regard to O^+ outflow