Performance Assessment

Elsevier, European Economic Review, Volume 141, January 2022
We study whether there is a racial bias in ratings of professional football players in Italian newspapers. We find that there is such a bias. Conditional on objective performance indicators black players receive a lower rating than non-black players. This is not a difference across the board but predominantly present at the lower end of the newspaper rating distribution. The best black players are not subject to a racial bias in ratings. We also find that clubs do not have a racial bias in the wages they pay to players.
Aquatic foods are increasingly being recognized as having an important role to play in an environmentally sustainable and nutritionally sufficient food system. Proposals for increasing aquatic food production often center around species, environments, and ambitious hi-tech solutions that mainly will benefit the 16% of the global population living in high-income countries.
The need to assess major infrastructure performance under a changing climate is widely recognized yet rarely practiced, particularly in rapidly growing African economies. Here, we consider high-stakes investments across the water, energy, and food sectors for two major river basins in a climate transition zone in Africa. We integrate detailed interpretation of observed and modeled climate-system behavior with hydrological modeling and decision-relevant performance metrics.
Elsevier, Global Environmental Change, Volume 67, March 2021
Our carbon-intensive economy has led to an average temperature rise of 1 °C since pre-industrial times. As a consequence, the world has seen increasing droughts, significant shrinking of the polar ice caps, and steady sea-level rise. To stall these issues’ worsening further, we must limit global warming to 1.5 °C. In addition to the economy's decarbonization, this endeavour requires the use of negative-emissions technologies (NETs) that remove the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere.
Currently, renewable energy is rapidly developing across the world in response to technical, economic and environmental developments, as well as political and social initiatives. On the other hand, excessive penetration of distributed generation (DG) systems into electrical networks may lead to various problems and operational limit violations, such as over and under voltages, excessive line losses, overloading of transformers and feeders, protection failure and high harmonic distortion levels exceeding the limits of international standards.
Elsevier, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Volume 33, December 2018
Rapid ocean warming as a result of climate change poses a key risk for coral reefs. Even if the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement are achieved, coral reefs are likely to decline by 70–90% relative to their current abundance by midcentury. Although alarming, coral communities that survive will play a key role in the regeneration of reefs by mid-to-late century.
Successful Food-energy-water (FEW) nexus projects will be more likely to succeed if a transdisciplinary approach is used. Ecological modernization (ecological technology) policies and practices, and sustainable supply chains influence the FEW nexus from a commerce and industry perspective. Taking these perspectives and considering their intertwined linkages is important for advancing research and adoption of FEW nexus efforts. This paper provides an overview of these perspectives and interlinkages.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), adopted in September 2015, are accompanied by targets which have to be met individually and collectively by the signatory states. SDG14 Life Below Water aims to lay the foundation for the integrated and sustainable management of the oceans. However, any environmental management has to be based around targets which are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bounded – otherwise it is not possible to determine whether management actions are successful and achieve the desired aims.
This paper analyzes the impact of data gap in Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) performance indicators on actual performance success of MDGs. Performance success, within the MDG framework, is quantified using six different ways proposed in the existing literature, including both absolute and relative performance and deviation from historical transition paths of MDG indicators. The empirical analysis clearly shows that the data gap in performance measurement is a significant predictor of poor MDG performance in terms of any of the six progress measures.
Elsevier, Building and Environment, Volume 97, February 15, 2016
Heat map of simulated annual heating demand for South Boston using UMI (a) and daily gas and electricity demand profiles for the highlighted building in South Boston (b).
Over the past decades, detailed individual building energy models (BEM) on the one side and regional and country-level building stock models on the other side have become established modes of analysis for building designers and energy policy makers, respectively. More recently, these two toolsets have begun to merge into hybrid methods that are meant to analyze the energy performance of neighborhoods, i.e. several dozens to thousands of buildings. This paper reviews emerging simulation methods and implementation workflows for such bottom-up urban building energy models (UBEM).

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