Community Sanctions and Measures

This chapter explores the use of community sanctions in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. It locates this discussion within a wider international landscape, where the numbers of people subject to supervision in the community has risen markedly. It explores some of the reasons for this growth alongside the rationalities that are deployed to promote the use of community sanctions over time. The differing trajectories of the two jurisdictions in respect of the evolution and use of community sanctions are explored, as are some of the factors that explain areas of divergence and commonality. The chapter concludes by critically considering penal reductionism as a point of policy convergence in the two jurisdictions.

Efficient RkNN Retrieval with Arbitrary Non-Metric Similarity Measures

A RkNN query returns all objects whose nearest k neighbors
contain the query object. In this paper, we consider RkNN
query processing in the case where the distances between
attribute values are not necessarily metric. Dissimilarities
between objects could then be a monotonic aggregate of dissimilarities
between their values, such aggregation functions
being specified at query time. We outline real world cases
that motivate RkNN processing in such scenarios. We consider
the AL-Tree index and its applicability in RkNN query
processing. We develop an approach that exploits the group
level reasoning enabled by the AL-Tree in RkNN processing.
We evaluate our approach against a Naive approach
that performs sequential scans on contiguous data and an
improved block-based approach that we provide. We use
real-world datasets and synthetic data with varying characteristics
for our experiments. This extensive empirical
evaluation shows that our approach is better than existing
methods in terms of computational and disk access costs,
leading to significantly better response times.

Integrated techno-economic and environmental assessments of sixty scenarios for co-firing biomass with coal and natural gas

Displacement of fossil fuel-based power through biomass co-firing could reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuels. In this study, data-intensive techno-economic models were developed to evaluate different co-firing technologies as well as the configurations of these technologies. The models were developed to study 60 different scenarios involving various biomass feedstocks (wood chips, wheat straw, and forest residues) co-fired either with coal in a 500 MW subcritical pulverized coal (PC) plant or with natural gas in a 500 MW natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) plant to determine their technical potential and costs, as well as to determine environmental benefits. The results obtained reveal that the fully paid-off coal-fired power plant co-fired with forest residues is the most attractive option, having levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) of $53.12–$54.50/MW h and CO2 abatement costs of $27.41–$31.15/tCO2. When whole forest chips are co-fired with coal in a fully paid-off plant, the LCOE and CO2 abatement costs range from $54.68 to $56.41/MW h and $35.60 to $41.78/tCO2, respectively. The LCOE and CO2 abatement costs for straw range from $54.62 to $57.35/MW h and $35.07 to $38.48/tCO2, respectively.

Case report:Evidence of rise in rabies cases in southern Malawi--better preventative measures are urgently required

We describe five children who died of clinical rabies in a three month period (September to November 2011) in the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. From previous experience and hospital records, this number of cases is higher than expected. We are concerned that difficulty in accessing post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) rabies vaccine may be partly responsible for this rise. We advocate: (a) prompt course of active immunisation for all patients with significant exposure to proven or suspected rabid animals. (b) the use of an intradermal immunisation regime that requires a smaller quantity of the vaccine than the intramuscular regime and gives a better antibody response. (c) improved dog rabies control measures.

Statistical Tests for Joint Analysis of Performance Measures

Recently there has been an increasing interest in the development of new methods using Pareto optimality to deal with multi-objective criteria (for example, accuracy and architectural complexity). Once one has learned a model based on their devised method, the problem is then how to compare it with the state of art. In machine learning, algorithms are typically evaluated by comparing their performance on different data sets by means of statistical tests. Unfortunately, the standard tests used for this purpose are not able to jointly consider performance measures. The aim of this paper is to resolve this issue by developing statistical procedures that are able to account for multiple competing measures at the same time. In particular, we develop two tests: a frequentist procedure based on the generalized likelihood-ratio test and a Bayesian procedure based on a multinomial-Dirichlet conjugate model. We further extend them by discovering conditional independences among measures to reduce the number of parameter of such models, as usually the number of studied cases is very reduced in such comparisons. Real data from a comparison among general purpose classifiers is used to show a practical application of our tests.

Small area estimation for the price of habitation transaction: comparison of different uncertainty measures of temporal EBLUP

Local level planning requires statistics for small areas, but normally due to cost or logistic constraints, sample surveys are often planned to provide reliable estimates only for large geographical regions and large subgroups of a population.

The effect of conservation measures on the spatial and temporal variation of rocky fish assemblages in the Arrábida Marine Park

Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been widely proposed for conservation purposes and as a tool for fisheries management. The Arrábida Marine Park is the first MPA in continental Portugal having a management plan, fully implemented since 2009. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of protection measures on rocky reef fish assemblages and target invertebrates through before-after and control-effect (no-take vs. fished areas) underwater visual surveys and analysis of landings trends. Second, we used surveys before, during and after implementation of the management plan to understand fishers‟ preferences for fishing grounds and adaptation to the new rules, and evaluated the reserve effect through analysis of both ecological responses and fishing effort density. Third, we identified the main oceanographic drivers influencing the structure of reef fish assemblages and predicted the community structure for the last 50 years, in light of climatic change. Overall results suggest positive responses in biomass but not yet in numbers of some commercial species, with no effects on non-target species. The reserve effect is reinforced by the increase in landings of commercial species, despite increased fishing effort density in some areas, especially with octopus traps. Fishing grounds are mainly chosen based on the distribution of target species and associated habitats, but distance to port, weather conditions and safety also influence fishers‟ choices. Moreover, different fisheries respond differently to the protection measures, and within each fishery, individual fishers show distinct strategies, with some operating in a broader area whereas others keep preferred territories. Our results also show that wind stress and temperature are the main oceanographic drivers for rocky reef fish assemblages, with tropicalization of assemblages and polewards movements of species over the last 50 years consistent with temperature trends. We believe this study provides significant lessons for marine conservation and management of coastal systems.

South Carolina Energy Office pre-approved Energy Efficiency Products and Measures

South Carolina law (48-52-640) requires state agencies to submit a disclaimer statement to the State Energy Office with its annual report stating that it did not purchase an energy conservation product that had not been certified by the State Energy Office. This is a list of preapproved products, retrofits and upgrades.