Comprehensive water resources management : a concept paper

The world is entering a period of intense competition for limited supplies of water for alternative uses - in agriculture, in urban and industrial supplies, for recreation, by wildlife, for human consumption, and to maintain environmental quality. Manifestations of this competition and our current ability to deal with it can be observed in many parts of the world. A large irrigation project in India does not operate because water has been diverted to the rapidly growing city of Pune. In China, industries are reducing their production because of water shortages. In California, selenium salts leached by irrigation are killing wildlife. Bank irrigation projects in Algeria are now competing with Bank urban water supply projects for the same water. Many proposed irrigation projects and most hydro project proposals are on hold because of environmental concerns. Until recently, the approaches taken in water planning management by planners in the developing countries and by analysts at the funding agencies were, by and large, appropriate and adequate to the task at hand. The increased competition for water, however, makes most of the project-by-project planning methods inadequate. The author discusses new approaches that are needed to integrate water resource use among different users and across different economic sectors.Water and Industry,Water Conservation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions

Multi-Objective Calibration For Agent-Based Models

Agent-based modelling is already proving to be an immensely useful tool for scientific and industrial modelling applications. Whilst the building of such models will always be something between an art and a science, once a detailed model has been built, the process of parameter calibration should be performed as precisely as possible. This task is often made difficult by the proliferation of model parameters with non-linear interactions. In addition to this, these models generate a large number of outputs, and their ‘accuracy’ can be measured by many different, often conflicting, criteria. In this paper we demonstrate the use of multi-objective optimisation tools to calibrate just such an agent-based model. We use an agent-based model of a financial market as an exemplar and calibrate the model using a multi-objective genetic algorithm. The technique is automated and requires no explicit weighting of criteria prior to calibration. The final choice of parameter set can be made after calibration with the additional input of the domain expert

The origins and evolution of French costing systems

Includes bibliographical references (p.25-28)

Bug chaser

The veins of the leaves were bustling roadways, complex interactions that occurred at such a distance from my own anthropocentric understanding, they may as well have inhabited their own universe. Dwelling within the infinite wonder of these microcosms, I coined myself a nickname that I abode within intimately: Bug Chaser. Perhaps I had heard the term on the news, or caught one of the teachers use it in passing, but as far as I was concerned, the term was entirely of my own creation. “I’m a bug chaser!” I announced triumphantly to my kindergarten class. “You mustn’t use that word,” chided the teaching assistant. “Why?”’ Her eyes were narrowed, as if she believed that the kindergartener looking vacantly in her direction knew exactly what he had just said, and had some hidden agenda. “It means … it means someone who likes to get sick.” “Oh.” Of course, the term I used to describe myself wasn’t original. But, I reasoned to myself, I could still be a bug chaser. After all, every word holds within itself an inherent meaning, and when we bestow these words upon ourselves we take on that inherent meaning, even if we don’t know it at the time. Sure enough, as I grew older I came to realize that I yearned for sickness, the way (I naively imagined) a true bug chaser would. It wasn’t until early high school, when I used the term within earshot of a passing teacher, that I learned the truth. Once again, I had discovered a rift between my own identity as a self-proclaimed bug chaser, and the bug chaser community at large. Yet I remained fascinated with the term, and the philosophies of the community that had taken on the onerous title. This community, interacting almost entirely within the confines of tiny forums on the periphery of the world wide web, had become synonymous within my prepubescent mind with the journey of finding one’s own asymptote

Equality, Efficiency and Judicial Restraint: Towards a Dynamic Constitution

Whatever else may be meant by equality in specific contexts, its ordinary usage requires a comparison of the political, social, and economic conditions of different members of society. Equality theories are normative theories that explain which differences in condition are justifiable, and which are unacceptable. In short, equality is about the distribution of social benefits and burdens; equality rights are rights to distributive justice