Special Issue : Highlights from the ITS European Congress in Glasgow (2016)

Peer reviewedPostprin

Adaptive Governance: An Introduction and Implications for Public Policy

Adaptive governance is a concept from institutional theory that deals with the evolution of institutions for the management of shared assets, particularly common pool resources and other forms of natural capital. This paper is the first of a set of four papers on adaptive governance, providing a brief overview of the history of the concept, the distinguishing features of the literature, and key insights provided for economists and policy advisors. We argue that adaptive governance provides an interesting lens for examining the political economy of policy responses akin to the concept of market failure within economics, but applied to wider processes of social learning and collective choice, including collective choices about the scope and structure of institutions that govern lower level choices by individuals and organizations.adaptive governance, public policy, common pool resources, natural resource management, wicked problems, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

A tool to aid redesign of flexible transport services to increase efficiency in rural transport service provision

This research was supported by the Research Councils UK Digital Economy programme award (reference: EP/G066051/1) to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub, at the University of Aberdeen.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Immune modulation in the treatment of respiratory infection

The limitations of currently available treatment for severe respiratory infection are demonstrated by the relatively fixed mortality associated with these infections despite advances in nutrition, vaccines, antibiotics, and critical care. This might be due in part to the changing spectrum of pathogens and development of drug resistance. Cytokines are potent molecules that function as growth factors and orchestrate both innate and adaptive immune responses. Several of these factors have entered the clinical arena to support or augment the immune response. Moreover, the use of cytokines has recently been expanded to patients without an overtly defective immune system but who have either significant infection or infection with drug resistant organisms. The use of cytokines as adjuvants in the treatment of respiratory infections is reviewed

Customizing kernel functions for SVM-based hyperspectral image classification

Previous research applying kernel methods such as support vector machines (SVMs) to hyperspectral image classification has achieved performance competitive with the best available algorithms. However, few efforts have been made to extend SVMs to cover the specific requirements of hyperspectral image classification, for example, by building tailor-made kernels. Observation of real-life spectral imagery from the AVIRIS hyperspectral sensor shows that the useful information for classification is not equally distributed across bands, which provides potential to enhance the SVM's performance through exploring different kernel functions. Spectrally weighted kernels are, therefore, proposed, and a set of particular weights is chosen by either optimizing an estimate of generalization error or evaluating each band's utility level. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are carried out on the publicly available 92AV3C dataset collected from the 220-dimensional AVIRIS hyperspectral sensor. Results indicate that the method is generally effective in improving performance: spectral weighting based on learning weights by gradient descent is found to be slightly better than an alternative method based on estimating ";relevance"; between band information and ground trut

Storm intensity and old-growth forest disturbances in the Amazon region

We analyzed the pattern of large forest disturbances or blow-downs apparently caused by severe storms in a mostly unmanaged portion of the Brazilian Amazon using 27 Landsat images and daily precipitation estimates from NOAA satellite data. For each Landsat a spectral mixture analysis (SMA) was applied. Based on SMA, we detected and mapped 279 patches (from 5 ha to 2,223 ha) characteristic of blow-downs. A total of 21,931 ha of forest were disturbed. We found a strong correlation between occurrence of blow-downs and frequency of heavy rainfall (Spearman\u27s rank, r2 = 0.84, p \u3c 0.0003). The recurrence intervals of large disturbances were estimated to be 90,000 yr for the eastern Amazon and 27,000 yr for the western Amazon. This suggests that weather patterns affect the frequency of large forest disturbances that may produce different rates of forest turnover in the eastern and western Amazon basin

Synthesis and Characterization of the Thiogermanic Acids H4Ge4S10 and H2Ge4S9

The synthesis and structure of the thiogermanic acids H4Ge4S10 and H2Ge4S9 are reported. A novel preparation method consisting of reacting germanium oxide with liquid hydrogen sulfide containing a trace amount of water is used to form Ge4S104- ions. Evaporating the hydrogen sulfide solution at room temperature leaves an unstable H4Ge4S10·xH2O product. The stoichiometry and structure of the thermally stable anhydrous phase are dependent on reaction time. An H4Ge4S10 product with an adamantane-like cage structure is obtained at shorter reaction times. Longer reaction times produce an H2Ge4S9 product with a more complex cage unit, a higher symmetry unit cell, and increased thermal stability. Raman, infrared, powder X-ray diffraction, and thermogravimetric data are reported for both structures

Crystal Structure of Thiogermanic Acid H4Ge4S10

X-ray diffraction analysis reveals the thiogermanic acid H4Ge4S10 possesses discrete adamantane-like Ge4S104- complex anions. Each thioanion is composed of four corner shared GeS2.5- tetrahedral units. Crystals were grown from anhydrous liquid hydrogen sulfide reactions with glassy germanium sulfide at room temperature. The crystal structure was solved and refined from single crystal diffractometer data (Mo Kα radiation) obtained at 173 K. H4Ge4S10 is triclinic, centrosymmetric space group P1̄, with a = 8.621(4) Å, b = 9.899(4) Å,c = 10.009(4) Å, α = 85.963(7)°, β = 64.714(7)°, γ = 89.501(8)°, and Z = 2. Average bridging and terminal d̄(Ge−S) distances are 2.229 and 2.206 Å, respectively. Vibrational mode assignments are reported from Raman scattering and IR absorption spectra of polycrystalline samples. The νs(Ge−S−Ge) and νs(Ge−S-) stretching modes are observed at 354 and 405 cm-1, respectively