Horizon 2020: a call to forge biodiversity links

For the upcoming calls for Horizon 2020 research funding, the European Commission has said that it would prefer bids from open, collaborative consortia rather than the competitive bids seen in previous funding programmes. To this end, the organizers of 18 European biodiversity informatics projects agreed at a meeting in Rome…

The perfect death - Horizons ( title of painting Horizon )

The exhibition investigates the unrepresentable and considers the distinct ways invisible forces can be given visual manifestation through painted images.

Sudan's Darfur : peace or more war on the horizon?

This year marks Sudan’s fiftieth year of independence. Unfortunately, it has very little to celebrate. Sudan, the largest country in Africa is best known for its long history of maladministration, human rights abuses, coups d’état, and for the past three years a ruthless government-backed assault on the people of Darfur in western Sudan.

Written by Dr Claude Rakisits, a consultant focusing on developments in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, the paper examines the latest developments in Darfur and the factors that will determine whether there will finally be peace for the people of Darfur and the Australian Government’s policy options for contributing to a possible UN peacekeeping operation in Darfur.

A wordless horizon

This research identifies and explores the thematic and technical innovations of a number of politically-engaged poets as a means to illustrate important aspects of the poet's own creative work. Fundamental to the exegesis is the development of a contemporary poetic founded on the problem of 'intersectionist oppression'

Connecting with the horizon : developing teachers' appreciation of mathematical structure

A professional learning program for teachers of junior secondary mathematics regarding the content and pedagogy of senior secondary mathematics is the context for this study of teachers’ mathematical and pedagogical knowledge. The analysis of teachers’ reflections on their learning explored teachers’ understanding of mathematical connections and their appreciation of mathematical structure. The findings indicate that a professional learning program about senior secondary mathematics can enable practicing teachers to deepen and broaden their knowledge for teaching junior secondary mathematics and develop their practice to support their students’ present and future learning of mathematics. Further research is needed about professional learning approaches and tasks that may enable teachers to imbed and develop awareness of structure in their practice.

Robust finite-horizon Kalman filtering for uncertain discrete-time systems

In this note, we propose a design for a robust finite-horizon Kalman filtering for discrete-time systems suffering from uncertainties in the modeling parameters and uncertainties in the observations process (missing measurements). The system parameter uncertainties are expected in the state, output and white noise covariance matrices. We find the upper-bound on the estimation error covariance and we minimize the proposed upper-bound.

Expanding horizon (Reykjavík)

Expanding horizons (Reykjavík) (2012-2013) is part of an ongoing series of interactive net-art/installation works that explores the space of the horizon line. Produced with time-lapse photography, animated movements, and playing with perception, this work explores how the vastness of a horizon line can be captured, compressed and re-presented for viewers to align with as an artwork

Golden opportunities: a horizon scan to expand sandy beach ecology

Robust ecological paradigms and theories should, ideally, hold across several ecosystems. Yet, limited testing of generalities has occurred in some habitats despite these habitats offering unique features to make them good model systems for experiments. We contend this is the case for the ocean-exposed sandy beaches. Beaches have several distinctive traits, including extreme malleability of habitats, strong environmental control of biota, intense cross-boundary exchanges, and food webs highly reliant on imported subsidies. Here we sketch broad topical themes and theoretical concepts of general ecology that are particularly well-suited for ecological studies on sandy shores. These span a broad range: the historical legacies and species traits that determine community assemblages; food-web architectures; novel ecosystems; landscape and spatial ecology and animal movements; invasive species dynamics; ecology of disturbances; ecological thresholds and ecosystem resilience; and habitat restoration and recovery. Collectively, these concepts have the potential to shape the outlook for beach ecology and they should also encourage marine ecologists to embrace, via cross-disciplinary ecological research, exposed sandy beach systems that link the oceans with the land.

Reservoir Management For Flood And Drought Protection Using Infinite Horizon Model Predictive Control

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a control method that solves in real time an optimal control problem over a finite horizon. The finiteness of the horizon is both the reason of MPC's success and its main limitation. In operational water resources management, MPC has been in fact successfully employed for controlling systems with a relatively short memory, such as canals, where the horizon length is not an issue. For reservoirs, which have generally a longer memory, MPC applications are presently limited to short term management only. Short term reservoir management can be effectively used to deal with fast process, such as floods, but it is not capable of looking sufficiently ahead to handle long term issues, such as drought. To overcome this limitation, we propose an Infinite Horizon MPC (IH-MPC) solution that is particularly suitable for reservoir management. We propose to structure the input signal by use of orthogonal basis functions, therefore reducing the optimization argument to a finite number of variables, and making the control problem solvable in a reasonable time. We applied this solution for the management of the Manantali Reservoir. Manantali is a yearly reservoir located in Mali, on the Senegal river, affecting water systems of Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania. The long term horizon offered by IH-MPC is necessary to deal with the strongly seasonal climate of the region.

Competitive equilibria in infinite-horizon collateralized economies with default penalties

Araújo, Páscoa and Torres-Martinez (2002) have shown that, without imposing either debt constraints or transversality conditions, Ponzi schemes are ruled out in infinite horizon economies with default when collateral is the only mechanism that partially secures loans. Páscoa and Seghir (2008) subsequently show that Ponzi schemes may reappear if, additionally to the seizure of the collateral, there are sufficiently harsh default penalties assessed (directly in terms of utility) against the defaulters. They also claim that if default penalties are moderate then Ponzi schemes are ruled out and existence of a competitive equilibrium is ensured. The objective of this paper is two fold. First, contrary to what is claimed by Páscoa and Seghir (2008), we show that moderate default penalties do not always prevent agents to run a Ponzi scheme. Second, we provide an alternative condition on default penalties that is sufficient to rule out Ponzi schemes and ensure the existence of a competitive equilibrium.