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Approach Works (approach + work)
Selected AbstractsPayments for Ecosystem Services in Nicaragua: Do Market-based Approaches Work?DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2010Gert Van Hecken ABSTRACT The concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is gaining increasing attention among scholars as well as conservation and development practitioners. The premises of this innovative conservation approach are appealing: private land users, usually poorly motivated to protect nature on their land, will do so if they receive payments from environmental service buyers which cover part of the land users' opportunity costs of developing the land. However, this article warns against an over-enthusiastic adoption of a one-sided market-based PES approach. Based on a field study of the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management Project (RISEMP), one of the main PES pilot projects in Nicaragua, it suggests that a mixture of economic and non-economic factors motivated farmers to adopt the envisaged silvopastoral practices and that the actual role of PES is mistakenly understood as a simple matter of financial incentives. The authors argue that PES approaches should be understood as a part of a broader process of local institutional transformation rather than as a market-based alternative for allegedly ineffective government and/or community governance. [source] Strategic dalliances as an enabler for discontinuous innovation in slow clockspeed industries: evidence from the oil and gas industryR & D MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2008Hannah Noke The concept of ,strategic dalliances', defined as non-committal relationships that companies can ,dip in and out of,' or dally with, while simultaneously maintaining longer-term strategic partnerships with other firms and suppliers , has emerged as a promising strategy by which organizations can create discontinuous innovations. But does this approach work equally well for every sector? Moreover, how can these links be effectively used to foster the process of discontinuous innovation? Toward assessing the role that industry clockspeed plays in the success or failure of strategic dalliances, we provide case study evidence from Twister BV, an upstream oil and gas technology provider, and show that strategic dalliances can be an enabler for the discontinuous innovation process in slow clockspeed industries. Implications for research and practice are discussed, and conclusions from our findings are drawn. [source] To All the Girls I've Loved Before: Academic Love Letters on Mentoring, Power, and DesireCOMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 1 2000Elizabeth Bell This epistolary essay features 6 letters portraying mentoring relationships among 4 women in the academy. Interrogating both genderless and gendered models of mentoring, this essay argues for "entrustment," a symbolic mother-daughter relationship between women is a better account of women's power and desire than traditional frameworks of male power and female mutuality. Second, these letters put academic labor in the background to foreground the multiple contexts-career, family, heterosexual relationship-from which women of different ages, races, and status approach work and relationship in the academy. Third, these letters pay debts to specific women, as well as paint portraits of past and future generations of women, in the creation and inheritance of legacies of cultural work. This project takes the risk of strategic separatism to create and to enact women-centered spaces in the academy where academic and relational labor thrives. [source] Dye Advection Without the Blur: A Level-Set Approach for Texture-Based Visualization of Unsteady FlowCOMPUTER GRAPHICS FORUM, Issue 3 2004D. Weiskopf Dye advection is an intuitive and versatile technique to visualize both steady and unsteady flow. Dye can be easily combined with noise-based dense vector field representations and is an important element in user-centric visual exploration processes. However, fast texture-based implementations of dye advection rely on linear interpolation operations that lead to severe diffusion artifacts. In this paper, a novel approach for dye advection is proposed to avoid this blurring and to achieve long and clearly defined streaklines or extended streak-like patterns. The interface between dye and background is modeled as a level-set within a signed distance field. The level-set evolution is governed by the underlying flow field and is computed by a semi-Lagrangian method. A reinitialization technique is used to counteract the distortions introduced by the level-set evolution and to maintain a level-set function that represents a local distance field. This approach works for 2D and 3D flow fields alike. It is demonstrated how the texture-based level-set representation lends itself to an efficient GPU implementation and therefore facilitates interactive visualization. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism [source] In-Class Simulation of Pooling Safety StockDECISION SCIENCES JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATION, Issue 2 2005D. Brent Bandy ABSTRACT In managing business process flows, safety stock can be used to protect against stockouts due to demand variability. When more than one location is involved, the concept of aggregation enables the pooling of demands and associated inventories, resulting in improved service levels without increasing the total level of safety stock. This pooling of safety stock can be done physically by consolidating inventory in one location, or by using virtual centralization, where inventories are kept at decentralized locations, but information is centralized. In teaching the concept of pooling safety stock, a simple in-class simulation can be helpful in demonstrating why the approach works. The approach presented here involves operations for a company where total product demand is constant, but there are two products and product mix can vary. The simulation can also be implemented using an electronic spreadsheet for classes that are taught on the Internet. A quiz was given to two sections, one that experienced the simulation and one that did not. A comparison of the results from the quiz provided evidence of the effectiveness of the simulation in helping students understand the impact of pooling safety stock. In addition, a brief anonymous survey that was administered in the section that had the simulation provided further support for the effectiveness of the simulation. [source] Dynamic Newton,gradient-direction-type algorithm for multilayer structure determination using grazing X-ray specular scattering: numerical simulation and analysisACTA CRYSTALLOGRAPHICA SECTION A, Issue 1 2009F. N. Chukhovskii A new dynamic iterative algorithm code for retrieving macroscopic multilayer structure parameters (the layer thickness and complex refraction index for each layer, the surface roughness and the interface roughness between the layers) from specular scattering angular scan data is proposed. The use of conventional direct methods, particularly the well known Newton algorithm and gradient-direction-type algorithm operating dynamically to minimize the error functional in a least-squares fashion, is explored. Such an approach works well and seems to be effective in solving the inverse problem in the high-resolution X-ray reflectometry (HRXR) method. In order to demonstrate some features of the proposed iterative algorithm, numerical calculations for retrieving three-layer structure parameters are carried out using simulated HRXR angular scan data. The calculations indicate clearly that the dynamic iterative algorithm is convergent and capable of yielding the true solution. It is important that the performance coefficient for successful iterative cycles for the absolute minimization of the HRXR error functional is quite high even if the initial values of the search parameters are chosen rather far from the true values. It is particularly noteworthy that the relative number of successful iterative cycles is of the order of 90,40% when only moderately accurate initial parameter values, varying by ±10,40% from the true values, are presumed. [source] ON MULTI-CLASS COST-SENSITIVE LEARNINGCOMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, Issue 3 2010Zhi-Hua Zhou Rescaling,is possibly the most popular approach to cost-sensitive learning. This approach works by rebalancing the classes according to their costs, and it can be realized in different ways, for example, re-weighting or resampling the training examples in proportion to their costs, moving the decision boundaries of classifiers faraway from high-cost classes in proportion to costs, etc. This approach is very effective in dealing with two-class problems, yet some studies showed that it is often not so helpful on multi-class problems. In this article, we try to explore why the rescaling approach is often helpless on multi-class problems. Our analysis discloses that the rescaling approach works well when the costs are,consistent, while directly applying it to multi-class problems with,inconsistent,costs may not be a good choice. Based on this recognition, we advocate that before applying the rescaling approach, the,consistency,of the costs must be examined at first. If the costs are consistent, the rescaling approach can be conducted directly; otherwise it is better to apply rescaling after decomposing the multi-class problem into a series of two-class problems. An empirical study involving 20 multi-class data sets and seven types of cost-sensitive learners validates our proposal. Moreover, we show that the proposal is also helpful for class-imbalance learning. [source] | ||||||||||||||||