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Statistical forecasting of regional avalanche danger using simulated snow-cover data
- Michael Schirmer, Michael Lehning, Jürg Schweizer
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- Journal:
- Journal of Glaciology / Volume 55 / Issue 193 / 2009
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 08 September 2017, pp. 761-768
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- Article
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In the past, numerical prediction of regional avalanche danger using statistical methods with meteorological input variables has shown insufficiently accurate results, possibly due to the lack of snowstratigraphy data. Detailed snow-cover data were rarely used because they were not readily available (manual observations). With the development and increasing use of snow-cover models this deficiency can now be rectified and model output can be used as input for forecasting models. We used the output of the physically based snow-cover model SNOWPACK combined with meteorological variables to investigate and establish a link to regional avalanche danger. Snow stratigraphy was simulated for the location of an automatic weather station near Davos, Switzerland, over nine winters. Only dry-snow situations were considered. A variety of selection algorithms was used to identify the most important simulated snow variables. Data mining and statistical methods, including classification trees, artificial neural networks, support vector machines, hidden Markov models and nearest-neighbour methods were trained on the forecasted regional avalanche danger (European avalanche danger scale). The best results were achieved with a nearest-neighbour method which used the avalanche danger level of the previous day as additional input. A cross-validated accuracy (hit rate) of 73% was obtained. This study suggests that modelled snow-stratigraphy variables, as provided by SNOWPACK, are able to improve numerical avalanche forecasting.
three - Fighting for the local: Americans for Prosperity and the struggle for school boards
- Edited by Helen M. Gunter, The University of Manchester, David Hall, The University of Manchester, Michael W. Apple, University of Wisconsin Madison School of Education
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- Book:
- Corporate Elites and the Reform of Public Education
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2017, pp 47-60
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Summary
Introduction
The United States is witnessing the growing power of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas. One of the major sites of the increased influence of such political forces has been Wisconsin. In 2011, the conservative Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker historically cut the state's public education budget and curtailed the collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector employees. These changes spurred a mobilisation by progressive and grassroots groups around the state. In response, national corporate actors and organisations, especially those funded by the billionaire fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, used their money and organisational power to support neoliberal and neoconservative policies. After swathes of voters petitioned for a new election to remove (‘recall’) the governor, the Koch-funded political advocacy organisation Americans for Prosperity spent millions in advertising, bus tours and phone banks during the campaign for Walker's recall election (Lavender, 2011). Backed by such extensive corporate support, Walker won the recall election, emboldening the corporate sector to further engage in social and educational policy reform. This extension of influence is part of the story we wish to tell in this chapter.
The Koch brothers’ influence extends beyond high-profile state-level elections. These billionaires’ dollars have begun moving into municipal affairs in small cities and towns, such as school board elections like Kenosha, Wisconsin (Smith, 2014a) and Jefferson County, Colorado. This raises a crucial question. Why do groups like Americans for Prosperity care about small-town school board elections?
Understanding why multibillionaire individuals and the political organisations they fund are interested in small-scale micropolitics helps us to decipher the larger ideological processes at stake in building corporate influence. While the sheer volume of this economic capital reveals a new form of political economic determinism – that more money necessarily buys more political power – other dynamics are also at play (see, for example, Ball, 2009a; Reckhow and Snyder, 2014). Critical investigations of conservative movements must consider how politically conservative forces assemble and gather power at the local level in order to develop ideological strongholds.
This chapter highlights two particularly significant local examples in the United States: school board elections in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2014 and in Jefferson County, Colorado in 2015. Through documentary analysis of school board records, news reports and district evaluations, in both Wisconsin and Colorado, we chronicle the political contest for control of each school board. Using a process tracing model, we note key sequences of events, outcomes and alliances (Collier, 2011).
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