The monitoring of herbaceous fuel moisture content is a crucial activity in order to assess savanna fire risks. Faced with the difficulty of managing wide areas of vegetated surfaces, remote sensing appears an attractive alternative for terrestrial measurements because of its advantages related to temporal resolution and spatial coverage. Earth observation (EO)-based vegetation indices (VIs) an...

Entrepreneurship in Advanced and Developing Countries: A Microeconomic Perspective The purpose of this paper is to provide a contribution to the identification of the role of entrepreneurship in economic growth by mapping out: 1) alternative ways of looking at entrepreneurship, distinguishing ‘creative destruction’ from simple ‘turbulence’; 2) the different microeconomic determinants of new fir...

This paper offers a framework for analysing the economic drivers and effects of agrobiodiversity loss, focusing on in-situ conservation at both farm and landscape levels. We distinguish between the proximate and fundamental causes of biodiversity loss in terms of the decentralised (microeconomic) behaviour of farming households. Special attention is paid to the interplay between microeconomic d...

Microeconomic reforms were introduced from the mid-1980s to stem the slippage in growth in Australia’s productivity and living standards. Productivity growth more than doubled in the 1990s to reach a record high. A range of possible explanations for the productivity surge are examined in the paper. The three most plausible are microeconomic reforms; education and skills in the workforce; and th...

In recent years demographic aging and its consequences have been recognized and discussed on macroeconomic levels, such as health care system, infrastructure, housing and labour market. However, the consequences are not only present on the macroeconomic level but also affect microeconomic issues such as a firm's growth and workforce. This exploratory study realises a microeconomic issue and inv...

Most energy-economy policy models offered to policy makers are deficient in terms of at least one of technological explicitness, microeconomic realism, or macroeconomic completeness. We herein describe CIMS, a model which starts with the technological explicitness of the “bottom-up” approach and adds the microeconomic realism and macroeconomic completeness of the “topdown” CGE approach. This pa...

This paper proposes a novel model for the prediction of bank failures, on the basis of both macroeconomic and bank-specific microeconomic factors. As bank failures are rare, in the paper we apply a regression method based on extreme value theory, which turns out to be more effective than classical logistic regression models, as it better leverages the information in the tail of the default dist...

This paper presents some experiences in the exploitation of a database interface development architecture in which the interface is implemented using the facilities of the database. It is shown how novel interfaces, specifically a multiparadigm query interface and a debugger for an active rule system, can benefit from and exploit the uniform representation of interface and database system conce...

Recent studies have suggested that educators should avoid concrete instantiations when the goal is to promote transfer. However, concrete instantiations may benefit transfer in the long run, particularly if they are “faded” into more abstract instantiations. Undergraduates were randomly assigned to learn a mathematical concept in one of three conditions: generic, in which the concept was instan...

We investigate the relation between two quantitative measures characterizing short term memory in input driven dynamical systems, namely the short term memory capacity (MC) [3] and the Fisher memory curve (FMC) [2]. We show that even though MC and FMC map the memory structure of the system under investigation from two quite different perspectives, for linear input driven dynamical systems they ...