Risk allocation in a public–private partnership: a case study of construction and operation of kindergartens in Kazakhstan

In Kazakhstan, a transitional nation in Central Asia, the development of public–private partnerships (PPPs) is at its early stage and increasingly of strategic importance. This case study investigates risk allocation in an ongoing project: the construction and operation of 11 kindergartens in the city of Karaganda in the concession form for 14 years. Drawing on a conceptual framework of effective risk allocation, the study identifies principal PPP risks, provides a critical assessment of how and in what way each partner bears a certain risk, highlights the reasons underpinning risk allocation decisions and delineates the lessons learned. The findings show that the government has effectively transferred most risks to the private sector partner, whilst both partners share the demand risk of childcare services and the project default risk. The strong elements of risk allocation include clear assignment of parties’ responsibilities, streamlined financing schemes and incentives to complete the main project phases on time. However, risk allocation has missed an opportunity to create incentives for service quality improvements and take advantage of economies of scale. The most controversial element of risk allocation, as the study finds, is a revenue stream that an operator is supposed to receive from the provision of services unrelated to childcare, as neither partner is able to mitigate this revenue risk. The article concludes that in the kindergartens’ PPP, the government has achieved almost complete transfer of risks to the private sector partner. However, the costs of transfer are extensive government financial outlays that seriously compromise the PPP value for money.

Camera and performer: energetic engagement with the shield

The stylistic strategies, in particular those concerning camera placement and movement, of The Shield (FX, 2002-08) seem to directly fit into an aesthetic tradition developed by US cop dramas like Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87), Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993-99) and NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993-2005). In these precinct dramas, decisions concerning spatial arrangements of camera and performer foreground a desire to present and react to action while it is happening, and with a minimum of apparent construction. As Jonathan Bignell (2009) has argued, the intimacy and immediacy of this stylistic approach, which has at its core an attempt at a documentary-like realism, is important to the police drama as a genre, while also being tendencies that have been taken as specific characteristics of television more generally. I explore how The Shield develops this tradition of a reactive camera style in its strategy of shooting with two cameras rather than one, with specific attention to how this shapes the presentation of performance. Through a detailed examination of the relationship between performer and camera(s) the chapter considers the way the series establishes access to the fictional world, which is crucial to the manner of police investigation central to its drama, and the impact of this on how we engage with performance. The cameras’ placement appears to balance various impulses, including: the demands of attending to an ensemble cast, spontaneous performance style, and action that is physically dynamic and involving. In a series that makes stylistic decisions around presentation of the body on-screen deliberately close yet obstructive, involving yet fleeting, the chapter explores the affect of this on the watching experience.

Integrated visual vocabulary in latent Dirichlet allocation-based scene classification for IKONOS image

Scene classification based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a more general modeling method known as a bag of visual words, in which the construction of a visual vocabulary is a crucial quantization process to ensure success of the classification. A framework is developed using the following new aspects: Gaussian mixture clustering for the quantization process, the use of an integrated visual vocabulary (IVV), which is built as the union of all centroids obtained from the separate quantization process of each class, and the usage of some features, including edge orientation histogram, CIELab color moments, and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). The experiments are conducted on IKONOS images with six semantic classes (tree, grassland, residential, commercial/industrial, road, and water). The results show that the use of an IVV increases the overall accuracy (OA) by 11 to 12% and 6% when it is implemented on the selected and all features, respectively. The selected features of CIELab color moments and GLCM provide a better OA than the implementation over CIELab color moment or GLCM as individuals. The latter increases the OA by only ∼2 to 3%. Moreover, the results show that the OA of LDA outperforms the OA of C4.5 and naive Bayes tree by ∼20%. © 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) [DOI: 10.1117/1.JRS.8.083690]

Simulation of tree-ring widths with a model for primary production, carbon allocation, and growth

We present a simple, generic model of annual tree growth, called "T". This model accepts input from a first-principles light-use efficiency model (the "P" model). The P model provides values for gross primary production (GPP) per unit of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). Absorbed PAR is estimated from the current leaf area. GPP is allocated to foliage, transport tissue, and fine-root production and respiration in such a way as to satisfy well-understood dimensional and functional relationships. Our approach thereby integrates two modelling approaches separately developed in the global carbon-cycle and forest-science literature. The T model can represent both ontogenetic effects (the impact of ageing) and the effects of environmental variations and trends (climate and CO2) on growth. Driven by local climate records, the model was applied to simulate ring widths during the period 1958–2006 for multiple trees of Pinus koraiensis from the Changbai Mountains in northeastern China. Each tree was initialised at its actual diameter at the time when local climate records started. The model produces realistic simulations of the interannual variability in ring width for different age cohorts (young, mature, and old). Both the simulations and observations show a significant positive response of tree-ring width to growing-season total photosynthetically active radiation (PAR0) and the ratio of actual to potential evapotranspiration (α), and a significant negative response to mean annual temperature (MAT). The slopes of the simulated and observed relationships with PAR0 and α are similar; the negative response to MAT is underestimated by the model. Comparison of simulations with fixed and changing atmospheric CO2 concentration shows that CO2 fertilisation over the past 50 years is too small to be distinguished in the ring-width data, given ontogenetic trends and interannual variability in climate.

Energy-efficient resource allocation in OFDM systems with distributed antennas

In this paper, we develop an energy-efficient resource-allocation scheme with proportional fairness for downlink multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with distributed antennas. Our aim is to maximize energy efficiency (EE) under the constraints of the overall transmit power of each remote access unit (RAU), proportional fairness data rates, and bit error rates (BERs). Because of the nonconvex nature of the optimization problem, obtaining the optimal solution is extremely computationally complex. Therefore, we develop a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm, which separates subcarrier allocation and power allocation. For the low-complexity algorithm, we first allocate subcarriers by assuming equal power distribution. Then, by exploiting the properties of fractional programming, we transform the nonconvex optimization problem in fractional form into an equivalent optimization problem in subtractive form, which includes a tractable solution. Next, an optimal energy-efficient power-allocation algorithm is developed to maximize EE while maintaining proportional fairness. Through computer simulation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed low-complexity algorithm and illustrate the fundamental trade off between energy and spectral-efficient transmission designs.

Simultaneous mobile sink allocation in home environments with applications in mobile consumer robotics

This paper presents a novel mobile sink area allocation scheme for consumer based mobile robotic devices with a proven application to robotic vacuum cleaners. In the home or office environment, rooms are physically separated by walls and an automated robotic cleaner cannot make a decision about which room to move to and perform the cleaning task. Likewise, state of the art cleaning robots do not move to other rooms without direct human interference. In a smart home monitoring system, sensor nodes may be deployed to monitor each separate room. In this work, a quad tree based data gathering scheme is proposed whereby the mobile sink physically moves through every room and logically links all separated sub-networks together. The proposed scheme sequentially collects data from the monitoring environment and transmits the information back to a base station. According to the sensor nodes information, the base station can command a cleaning robot to move to a specific location in the home environment. The quad tree based data gathering scheme minimizes the data gathering tour length and time through the efficient allocation of data gathering areas. A calculated shortest path data gathering tour can efficiently be allocated to the robotic cleaner to complete the cleaning task within a minimum time period. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively allocate and control the cleaning area to the robot vacuum cleaner without any direct interference from the consumer. The performance of the proposed scheme is then validated with a set of practical sequential data gathering tours in a typical office/home environment.

What you see is what you want to see: motivationally relevant stimuli can interrupt current resource allocation

Arousing stimuli, either threat-related or pleasant, may be selected for priority at different stages within the processing stream. Here we examine the pattern of processing for non-task-relevant threatening (spiders: arousing to some) and pleasant stimuli (babies or chocolate: arousing to all) by recording the gaze of a spider Fearful and Non-fearful group while they performed a simple “follow the cross” task. There was no difference in first saccade latencies. Saccade trajectories showed a general hypervigilance for all stimuli in the Fearful group. Saccade landing positions corresponded to what each group would find arousing, such that the Fearful group deviated towards both types of images whereas the Non-fearful group deviated towards pleasant images. Secondary corrective saccade latencies away from threat-related stimuli were longer for the Fearful group (difficulty in disengaging) compared with the Non-fearful group. These results suggest that attentional biases towards arousing stimuli may occur at different processing stages.

Limitations to recording larger mammalian predators in savannah using camera traps and spoor

Traditionally, spoor (tracks, pug marks) have been used as a cost effective tool to assess the presence of larger mammals. Automated camera traps are now increasingly utilized to monitor wildlife, primarily as the cost has greatly declined and statistical approaches to data analysis have improved. While camera traps have become ubiquitous, we have little understanding of their effectiveness when compared to traditional approaches using spoor in the field. Here, we a) test the success of camera traps in recording a range of carnivore species against spoor; b) ask if simple measures of spoor size taken by amateur volunteers is likely to allow individual identification of leopards and c) for a trained tracker, ask if this approach may allow individual leopards to be followed with confidence in savannah habitat. We found that camera traps significantly under-recorded mammalian top and meso-carnivores, with camera traps more likely under-record the presence of smaller carnivores (civet 64%; genet 46%, Meller’s mongoose 45%) than larger (jackal sp. 30%, brown hyena 22%), while leopard was more likely to be recorded by camera trap (all recorded by camera trap only). We found that amateur trackers could be beneficial in regards to collecting presence data; however the large variance in measurements of spoor taken in the field by volunteers suggests that this approach is unlikely to add further data. Nevertheless, the use of simple spoor measurements in the field by a trained field researcher increases their ability to reliably follow a leopard trail in difficult terrain. This allows researchers to glean further data on leopard behaviour and habitat utilisation without the need for complex analysis.

Human resource allocation management in multiple projects using sociometric techniques

This article describes a new application of key psychological concepts in the area of Sociometry for the selection of workers within organizations in which projects are developed. The project manager can use a new procedure to determine which individuals should be chosen from a given pool of resources and how to combine them into one or several simultaneous groups/projects in order to assure the highest possible overall work efficiency from the standpoint of social interaction. The optimization process was carried out by means of matrix calculations performed using a computer or even manually, and based on a number of new ratios generated ad-hoc and composed on the basis of indices frequently used in Sociometry.