Despite intensive efforts during the past 20 years, no generally accepted standard method exists to measure black carbon (BC) or elemental carbon (EC). Data on BC and EC concentrations are method specific and can differ widely (e.g. Schmid et al., 2001, ten Brink et al., 2004). In this study, a comprehensive set of methods (both optical and thermal) is compared. Measurements were performed unde...

This paper demonstrates that the conditional negative binomial model for panel data, proposed by Hausman, Hall and Griliches (1984), is not a true fixed-effects method. This method—which has been implemented in both Stata and LIMDEP—does not, in fact, control for all stable covariates. Three alternative methods are explored. A negative multinomial model yields the same estimator as the conditio...

Variations reported in the in-tlight absolute radiometric calibration of the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) and the Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat 4 are reviewed. At short wavelengths these sensors exhibited a gradual reduction in response, while in the midinfrared the TM showed oscillatory variations, according to the results of TM internal calibration. The methodology and results are pres...

Interior point methods were widely used in the past in the form of barrier methods. In linear programming, the simplex method dominated, mainly due to inefficiencies of barrier methods. Interior point methods became quit popular again after 1984, when Karmarkar announced a fast polynomial-time interior method for nonlinear programming [Karmarkar, 1984]. In this section we present primal-dual in...

The central issue examined in this paper is this: ,Under what circumstances ought governmentally-imposed standards be favored over other policy instruments? The main points made in this paper are as follows. First, the controversy over whether taxes are preferable to quantitative controls was resolved by demonstrating the formal equivalence of taxes and standards. It is always possible to trans...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a standard method of measurement for social capital. Various authors have investigated the influence of social capital on economic growth but still social capital has not been measured in any satisfactory way. So far, each survey has used its own ad hoc methodology due to the heterogeneity of the very definition of the concept of social capital. A consens...

Polylactides (PLAs) have been known for several decades but only recently have these polymers gained commercial significance as a leading environmentally benign plastic available from renewable resources. Therefore, it is highly desirable to understand the optical properties of these materials so that they can be manipulated to develop materials of desirable characteristics for a specific objec...

Recent developments in the storage industry have resulted in the creation of an industry standard application programmer’s interface (API) known as XAM, the eXtensible Access Method. The XAM API focuses on the creation and management of reference information (otherwise known as fixed content). Storage vendors supporting the XAM API will provide new benefits to applications that are creating and...

It is a common belief that Tikhonov scheme with ‖ · ‖L2 -penalty fails to reconstruct a sparse structure with respect to a given system {φi}. However, in this paper we present a procedure for sparsity reconstruction, which is totally based on the standard Tikhonov method. This procedure consists of two steps. At first Tikhonov scheme is used as a sieve to find the coefficients near φi, which ar...