In order to incorporate the effect of gravity waves (GWs) on the atmospheric circulation most global circulation models (GCMs) employ gravity wave parameterization schemes. To date, GW parameterization schemes in GCMs are used without experimental validation of the set of global parameters assumed for the GW launch spectrum. This paper focuses on the Warner and McIntyre GW parameterization sche...

Fonkoze, a microfinance institution in Haiti, has used a poverty “scorecard” to benchmark existing client data to the $1-a-day extreme poverty line. By referring to data from a national survey of household income, 12 variables already routinely collected by Fonkoze were found to be suitable as indicators of whether a household is above or below the extreme poverty line. A scorecard was construc...

As the language generation community explores the possibility of an evaluation program for language generation, it behooves us to examine our experience in evaluation of other systems that produce text as output. Large scale evaluation of summarization systems and of question answering systems has been carried out for several years now. Summarization and question answering systems produce text ...

C onservationists must make hard choices about where to invest limited resources for the protection of biological diversity. Numerous prioritization schemes have identified places where biodiversity is especially rich or risks are especially urgent (1). Application of return on investment (ROI) thinking promises to make conservation investments much more efficient by explicitly incorporating ec...

Current snowmelt parameterisation schemes are largely untested in warmer maritime snowfields, where physical snow properties can differ substantially from the more common colder snow environments. Physical properties such as snow density influence the thermal properties of snow layers and are likely to be important for snowmelt rates. Existing methods for incorporating physical snow properties ...

P2P networks suffer from the free-riding problem, wherein users connect to the network only to use the resources, but do not donate any resources themselves. A popular approach to overcome this problem is to reward peers who share their resources, through payments. This has given a fresh lease of life to micropayments schemes, which are now being used in such networks. P2P Micropayment schemes ...

The 2007–08 food price crises caused hardship on a number of fronts in countries throughout the world. The steep rise in food prices led to economic difficulties for the poor and generated social and political turmoil in many countries. Haiti, Egypt, Bangladesh, Cote D'Ivoire, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia are among the 33 countries that saw violent food riots, demonstrations, or social unres...

An easy and rapid microwave-assisted green synthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) was carried out using aqueous bark extract of arjuna and their antibacterial and anti-biofilm potential was investigated. The AgNPs were characterized by various techniques .The FTIR data revealed the presence of plant organic constituents and metabolites bound to TA-AgNPs, which contributes for their stability...