Beyond the Threshold: Investing in Women-led Small and Growing Businesses

This collaborative research project was designed to address the need for greater depth, insight, and clarity on the problems of underinvestment in Women-led Small and Growing Businesses (WSGBs), including those led by younger women (18-35 years old). It is an intentionally exploratory process intended to foster collaboration among ANDE members while also contributing to the existing body of knowledge and identifying areas for further exploration, study, and action. The research recognizes that women entrepreneurs are not a homogenous group, and attempts where possible to make distinctions based on other socioeconomic and demographic factors, as well as to acknowledge the variance in preferences even among those narrower groups

Constructing monotone homotopies and sweepouts

This article investigates when homotopies can be converted to monotone homotopies without increasing the lengths of curves. A monotone homotopy is one which consists of curves which are simple or constant, and in which curves are pairwise disjoint. We show that, if the boundary of a Riemannian disc can be contracted through curves of length less than $L$, then it can also be contracted monotonously through curves of length less than $L$. This proves a conjecture of Chambers and Rotman. Additionally, any sweepout of a Riemannian $2$-sphere through curves of length less than $L$ can be replaced with a monotone sweepout through curves of length less than $L$. Applications of these results are also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

ACCUMULATION AND RENTAL BEHAVIOR IN THE MARKET FOR FARMLAND

A farmerÂ’s choices of tenure and farm size result from a complex interplay of economic factors technology, entrepreneurial ability, and personal preferences. This paper examines the qualitative effects of these factors on tenure and farm size in a dynamic optimization framework. One implication of the theoretical model is that changes in technology should cause systematic differences to be observed between rates of return on farmland and rates earned on comparable long-term assets. This implication is supported by an empirical test.Land Economics/Use,

On the complexity of optimal homotopies

In this article, we provide new structural results and algorithms for the Homotopy Height problem. In broad terms, this problem quantifies how much a curve on a surface needs to be stretched to sweep continuously between two positions. More precisely, given two homotopic curves $\gamma_1$ and $\gamma_2$ on a combinatorial (say, triangulated) surface, we investigate the problem of computing a homotopy between $\gamma_1$ and $\gamma_2$ where the length of the longest intermediate curve is minimized. Such optimal homotopies are relevant for a wide range of purposes, from very theoretical questions in quantitative homotopy theory to more practical applications such as similarity measures on meshes and graph searching problems. We prove that Homotopy Height is in the complexity class NP, and the corresponding exponential algorithm is the best one known for this problem. This result builds on a structural theorem on monotonicity of optimal homotopies, which is proved in a companion paper. Then we show that this problem encompasses the Homotopic Fr\'echet distance problem which we therefore also establish to be in NP, answering a question which has previously been considered in several different settings. We also provide an O(log n)-approximation algorithm for Homotopy Height on surfaces by adapting an earlier algorithm of Har-Peled, Nayyeri, Salvatipour and Sidiropoulos in the planar setting

The ‘Little Ice Age’ in the Southern Hemisphere in the context of the last 3000 years : Peat-based proxy-climate data from Tierra del Fuego

DM’s research (at Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University) was supported through a European Community Marie Curie Fellowship (Contract HPMF-CT-2000-01056).Peer reviewedPostprin

An approach to assess the quality of Jupyter projects published by GLAM institutions

GLAM organizations have been digitizing their collections and making them available for the public for several decades. Recent methods for publishing digital collections such as “GLAM Labs” and “Collections as Data” provide guidelines for the application of computational methods to reuse the contents of cultural heritage institutions in innovative and creative ways. Jupyter Notebooks have become a powerful tool to foster use of these collections by digital humanities researchers. Based on previous approaches for quality assessment, which have been adapted for cultural heritage collections, this paper proposes a methodology for assessing the quality of projects based on Jupyter Notebooks published by relevant GLAM institutions. A list of projects based on Jupyter Notebooks using cultural heritage data has been evaluated. Common features and best practices have been identified. A detailed analysis, that can be useful for organizations interested in creating their own Jupyter Notebooks projects, has been provided. Open issues requiring further work and additional avenues for exploration are outlined

Personal Food Computer: A new device for controlled-environment agriculture

Due to their interdisciplinary nature, devices for controlled-environment agriculture have the possibility to turn into ideal tools not only to conduct research on plant phenology but also to create curricula in a wide range of disciplines. Controlled-environment devices are increasing their functionalities as well as improving their accessibility. Traditionally, building one of these devices from scratch implies knowledge in fields such as mechanical engineering, digital electronics, programming, and energy management. However, the requirements of an effective controlled environment device for personal use brings new constraints and challenges. This paper presents the OpenAg Personal Food Computer (PFC); a low cost desktop size platform, which not only targets plant phenology researchers but also hobbyists, makers, and teachers from elementary to high-school levels (K-12). The PFC is completely open-source and it is intended to become a tool that can be used for collective data sharing and plant growth analysis. Thanks to its modular design, the PFC can be used in a large spectrum of activities.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, Accepted at the 2017 Future Technologies Conference (FTC

A Family of Metrics from the Truncated Smoothing of Reeb Graphs

In this paper, we introduce an extension of smoothing on Reeb graphs, which we call truncated smoothing; this in turn allows us to define a new family of metrics which generalize the interleaving distance for Reeb graphs. Intuitively, we "chop off" parts near local minima and maxima during the course of smoothing, where the amount cut is controlled by a parameter ?. After formalizing truncation as a functor, we show that when applied after the smoothing functor, this prevents extensive expansion of the range of the function, and yields particularly nice properties (such as maintaining connectivity) when combined with smoothing for 0 ? ? ? 2?, where ? is the smoothing parameter. Then, for the restriction of ? ? [0,?], we have additional structure which we can take advantage of to construct a categorical flow for any choice of slope m ? [0,1]. Using the infrastructure built for a category with a flow, this then gives an interleaving distance for every m ? [0,1], which is a generalization of the original interleaving distance, which is the case m = 0. While the resulting metrics are not stable, we show that any pair of these for m, m\u27 ? [0,1) are strongly equivalent metrics, which in turn gives stability of each metric up to a multiplicative constant. We conclude by discussing implications of this metric within the broader family of metrics for Reeb graphs

Improvements to Drinking Water: Monitoring, Reporting and Record-keeping Needed to Protect Health

Taumata Arowai, the new independent water services regulator, recently consulted publicly on the drinking water rules for water suppliers. We use a case study on nitrate and official information requests to demonstrate the current weaknesses in the drinking water monitoring and reporting systems and why the reforms proposed by Taumata Arowai seem unlikely to substantively address many of these deficiencies. To ensure sufficient public health surveillance and robust epidemiological research into the potential health impacts of drinking water contaminants, Taumata Arowai should: 1) establish a national database for water supply and quality; 2) mandate the standardisation of reporting requirements across water suppliers; 3) increase the frequency and range of water quality testing; and 4) maintain a national map of water supplies. These upgrades are particularly important in an era of rapid land use changes and climate change

Ascertaining the nature and timing of mire degradation : using palaeoecology to assist future conservation management in Northern England

This study was initiated under contract VT0419 from English Nature (Natural England) to CECQR. In 2015, additional funding was provided by the Yorkshire Peat Partnership, for 210Pb dating, to refine age–depth estimates. We thank the following for fieldwork co-ordination, logistics or field assistance: Miriam Baynes, Mike Sutcliffe, Martin Furness, Gez Marshall, Paul Duncan, Tim Page, Andrew Windrum, Craig Sandham and Jackie Smith. We thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions for improvements.Peer reviewedPublisher PD