This paper provides a behavioural and welfare analysis of an intermediary in biodiversity offset markets. These markets are characterised by high information requirements and transaction costs, ...threatening economic efficiency and even biodiversity outcomes. Specialised intermediaries facilitate trading by providing information and brokering services. By buying, holding and selling offset credits from storage, the intermediary can decrease both financial and ecological risks in the market. As a drawback, the intermediary may exploit market power upstream or downstream due to ecological features of the offset market. Intermediaries decrease the trading parties’ transaction costs by offering specialised information, reduce uncertainty, and decrease the costs of offsetting by increasing liquidity in the market and offering certain offset credits. When the intermediary has market power, selling and buying prices deviate from the competitive equilibrium. This welfare loss may be lower than the loss from transaction costs and trade ratios in decentralised trade, even in the case of the intermediary having both monopoly and monopsony power. The intermediary is the most useful when trade ratios are high and when the intermediary stores mature credits, which eliminates ecological uncertainty and thereby offers cost savings for developers, and may result in a higher level of biodiversity.
The study aims to discover the dynamic and processual nature of a supervisory relationship (here a leader–member exchange) through a novel, theoretical concept termed leader–member exchange breach, ...and by examining the characteristics of negative exchange interactions within the leader–member exchange relationship. The notion of the leader–member exchange breach is empirically defined through data on 336 responses to open-ended questions on negative interactions between leaders and subordinates, analyzed through qualitative analysis methods. The results of the study raise questions about the complexity of leader–member exchange relationships and show that breaches of the leader–member exchange relationship might lead to a reassessment of the dyadic relationship between leaders and their subordinates, spanning or even breaking the exchange relationships. This study extends current knowledge on leader–member exchange relationships by providing a viewpoint on the leader–member exchange breach that helps explain the processual and dynamic nature of those relationships through interpersonal interactions and exchanges.
This paper presents a numerical study on the effects of microwave irradiation on the mechanical properties of hard rock. More specifically, the weakening effect of microwave heating induced damage on ...the uniaxial compressive and tensile strength of granite-like rock is numerically evaluated. Rock fracture is modelled by means of a damage-viscoplasticity model with separate damage variables for tensile and compressive failure types. We develop a global solution strategy where the electromagnetic problem is solved first separately in COMSOL multiphysics software, and then provided into a staggered implicit solution method for the thermo-mechanical problem. The thermal and mechanical parts of the problem are considered as uncoupled due to the dominance of the microwave-induced heat source. The model performance is tested in 2D finite element simulations of heterogeneous numerical rock specimens subjected first to heating in a microwave oven and then to uniaxial compression and tension tests. According to the results, the compressive and tensile strength of rock can be significantly reduced by microwave heating pretreatment.
About the Authors: Joseph C. Ayoob * E-mail: jayoob@pitt.edu Affiliations Joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States ...of America, Department of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America ORCID logo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3628-5592 Joshua D. Kangas Affiliations Joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Computational Biology Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America ORCID logo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6742-5113 Citation: Ayoob JC, Kangas JD (2020) 10 simple rules for teaching wet-lab experimentation to computational biology students, i.e., turning computer mice into lab rats. While we use our course as the framework for the presented rules, they are broadly applicable and adaptable to similar graduate and undergraduate programs. ...this article will appeal to anyone interested in approaches for providing hands-on training in experimental techniques to computational trainees, particularly to faculty and program directors of computational biology and related graduate or undergraduate programs that want to provide this foundational course-based research training to their students. ...we strive to enable our students to be able to better communicate with experimentalist collaborators by having them think like an experimentalist. Do real science When our lab course was first started, there were many cookie cutter “experiments” and demonstrations that made up the curriculum. Because of this, student engagement was not high.
•We test algal turf scrubbers using agricultural drainage water and solar power.•Algal growth rates using daytime flow were 3-fold lower than rates using 24-h flow.•Nitrogen removal rates appear to ...be correlated to ATS water flow rates.•Projected nutrient removal costs were much higher than those from previous studies.
The objectives of this study were to determine nutrient removal rates and costs using solar-powered algal turf scrubber (ATS) raceways and water from an agricultural drainage ditch. Algal productivity using daytime-only flow was 3-lower compared to productivity using continuous flow. Results from this and other studies suggest a non-linear relationship between flow rate and nitrogen removal rates. Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) removal rates averaged 125mg N, 25mgPm−2d−1 at the highest flow rates. Nutrient removal rates were equivalent to 310kgN and 33kgPha−1 over a 7month season. Projected nutrient removal costs ($90–$110kg−1 N or $830–$1050kg−1 P) are >10-fold higher than previous estimates for ATS units used to treat manure effluents.
Kierkegaard’s religious discourses – his writings which have explicitly dealt with religion – have historically been given scant attention by philosophers. They have generally been considered to be ...of less philosophical interest than his ‘proper’ philosophy. Errant Affirmations radically questions this claim and considers Kierkegaard’s religious writings as absolutely central to his philosophical vision. Through close and clear readings of Kierkegaard’s work, David Kangas argues that contemporary philosophical themes – gift, temporality, language, death, nothingness, economy and selfhood- are not only evident in the ‘religious’ works but explored with real depth and fascination. Above all, the book argues that Kierkegaard’s positive account of the human condition, his “ontology,” fully emerges only in these discourses. It shows how these discourses are organized around an “errant” kind of affirmation—namely, an affirmation of existence that is without conditions. Such affirmation involves the intensification of life around “today” and coincides with a joy that has no particular cause. It is an affirmation capable of affirming life even amidst its finitude and suffering. Errant Affirmations is a fresh interpretation of Kierkegaard’s understudied works that not only opens up a new reading of Kierkegaard but elucidates his ‘religious’ texts and places them organically within his philosophy as a whole.
A high-throughput proton (1H) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabonomics approach is introduced to characterise systemic metabolic phenotypes. The methodology combines two molecular windows that ...contain the majority of the metabolic information available by 1H NMR from native serum, e.g. serum lipids, lipoprotein subclasses as well as various low-molecular-weight metabolites. The experimentation is robotics-controlled and fully automated with a capacity of about 150-180 samples in 24 h. To the best of our knowledge, the presented set-up is unique in the sense of experimental high-throughput, cost-effectiveness, and automated multi-metabolic data analyses. As an example, we demonstrate that the NMR data as such reveal associations between systemic metabolic phenotypes and the metabolic syndrome (n = 4407). The high-throughput of up to 50,000 serum samples per year is also paving the way for this technology in large-scale clinical and epidemiological studies. In contradiction to single 'biomarkers', the application of this holistic NMR approach and the integrated computational methods provides a data-driven systems biology approach to biomedical research.
The Siberian flying squirrel (Pteromys volans) is included among the strictly protected species of the Habitats Directive (92/43/EC) of the European Union, which is one of the key instruments for ...biodiversity preservation in Europe. Strict protection of the species has a potential to cause conflicts in areas where forest management and urban development compete for the same space with the flying squirrel. This study examined attitudes of Finnish citizens toward the protection of flying squirrels in urban areas using survey data collected in three cities: Espoo, Jyväskylä, and Kuopio. Two samples (random and self-selection samples) were collected to investigate how the specific process of giving "voice" to citizens by polls in urban planning affects the results. The analysis was conducted by integrating factor and cluster analysis and multinomial logistic regression modeling. Four attitude groups of citizens were identified and named: "neutral on protection" (share of respondents: 33%), "strongly in favor of protection" (32%), "somewhat against protection" (26%), and "strongly against protection" (9%). Several individual-specific factors were found to be associated with the probability of belonging to different attitude groups. For example, female respondents had a higher probability of belonging to the group that was strongly in favor of protection, and older respondents had a higher probability of belonging to groups against protection. Respondents of the self-selection sample had a higher probability of belonging to the "strongly in favor of protection" group. They therefore had a more positive attitude toward the protection of flying squirrels than the other respondents. This finding indicates that cities may gain an overly positive view of citizens' attitudes toward the protection of flying squirrels through current public participation methods based on self-selection procedures, such as public hearings used in land use planning.
Despite evidence of unequal learning opportunities, there is limited understanding of how English learners (ELs) with disabilities are faring academically nationwide in comparison with their EL and ...student with disability counterparts. In response, we conducted secondary data analyses of the 2009 to 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessments. Compared to their peers, ELs with disabilities performed lower in both Grades 4 and 8. There is a visible improvement in this important student population’s performance on the NAEP 2015 reading assessment—a year in which disaggregated reporting for ELs with disabilities performance became mandatory. These findings have implications for improved instructional, assessment, and program supports to serve ELs with disabilities.
Kangas examines how the charismatic renewal fueled the rise of covenant communities in the US. The influence of Pentecostal worship in the Roman Catholic Church has most prominently been seen through ...the advent of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR). This movement began in 1967 and was a driving force in bringing dimensions of Pentecostal worship into the lives of many Christian faithful, both within the Catholic church as well as in the of lives Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, and Messianic Jewish Christians. The Word of God Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was the most influential community in the early formation of worship in the CCR. Charismatic dimensions of worship are often most visible in the context of a worship service. However, the Word of God Community was built upon a foundation of community life that predated their introduction into the life of early Charismatic groups.
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