Subsidiary Information Research Articles

Lithuanian Obscene Paremias: Peculiarities of Recording and Publication

The article deals with obscene paremias in terms of their usage, recording and publication; besides, the prevailing interwar attitude of the society and scholars towards these obscene folklore pieces is also revealed. This empiric study is based on archived materials and articles from interwar periodicals; it strives to reveal several different perspectives, i. e. those of folklore bearers, collectors and researchers. The analysis of the obscene paremias, including certain aspects of using this limitedly public kind of folklore, the history of its collection and publication enabled re-consideration of problematic questions raised by the obscene folk compositions and noting the changing attitude towards this kind of folklore in the nowadays folkloristics. Apparently, the most significant turn in the process of collecting was affected by the guides for folklore collecting published since the 1920s, since they emphasized that various kinds of folklore were worth recording, regardless of their ethical merits. Besides, the folklore collectors were encouraged to record not only the texts of the paremias, but also all the subsidiary information, related to the recorded variants. Observations and commentaries by informants and recorders constitute the very important and nearly the only available materials elucidating the situations of using the obscene paremias.
 Obviously, changes in the prevailing ideology resulted in shifting character of censoring, along with altered boundaries of morality. For instance, certain paremias considered immoral in the middle of the 19th century, were not censored when reprinted in the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, certain words that were considered proper in the 19th century, were censored in the first half of the 20th century. There is still no unanimous and clear agreement on the ways of dealing with the obscene folklore, although with time, researchers’ attitudes shift towards the scholarly objectivity. This shift is obvious in the fundamental collection of the “Lithuanian Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases”, the recent volumes on which include obscene variants of paremias (contrary to the first volumes).

Subsidiary Governance and Corporate Tax Planning: The Effect of Parent-Subsidiary Common Directors and Officers

ABSTRACTTop executives of the parent company often take positions as the directors and officers (D&Os) of subsidiaries. These parent-subsidiary common D&Os have better access to subsidiary information and can exert more influence over subsidiary operations. Therefore they can better identify tax-planning opportunities and coordinate tax arrangements. Using the mandatory disclosure of top executives' subsidiary positions for Chinese listed firms, we find that effective income tax rate is lower for firms with common D&Os. The tax-saving effect is stronger for firms with more intangible assets and with related-party transactions involving subsidiaries. The effect is also stronger when common D&Os have positions in economically significant subsidiaries and the subsidiaries entitled to preferential tax treatment and when common D&Os are involved in daily subsidiary operations. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to study the role of subsidiary governance in general and common D&Os in particular in corporate tax-planning.

Application Research on Information Integration Technology of Bridge BIM Model Based on 2-D EBS Coding System

In the trend of information technology, BIM Technology has been widely used in the design, construction and maintenance stages of bridge engineering activities with its own advantages. At present, BIM Technology has made further development to realize the bridge life cycle information. In view of the shortage of information carrier in the application of EBS in BIM life cycle, this paper proposes a 2-dimensional EBS coding system component decomposition coding system. The 2-D EBS coding system is composed of component information and subsidiary information. Through the practical application of Shapotou Yellow River Bridge in Ningxia, the possibility of 2-D EBS coding system in bridge life cycle information integration, exchange and storage is further verified. It provides a link role for bridge life cycle informatization, and has strong engineering practice significance.

Методы и алгоритмы шумоочистки звука в реальном времени

The voice cleaning methods and algorithms play a key role both in preprocessing speech for further analysis and recognition, and in improving the quality of communication between users of information networks. The real-time streaming noise cleaning methods are the most important and complex area. The ability to process streaming data without delays imposes a number of significant restrictions on the algorithm: it cannot be iterative with a previously unknown number of iterations, and cannot explicitly use the data before or after the current block being processed. In the work, a modern adaptive noise reduction method for speech that can work with minimal signal transmission delays has been proposed. A large-scale study of existing approaches has been conducted, with special attention paid to two groups of algorithms: noise detection algorithms and noise suppression algorithms. Based on them the developed algorithm meeting the specified requirements has been built and analyzed. A set of audio data of Russian speech with various noises superimposed on it has been created. The testing of the algorithm has been made and its comparison with existing actual noise cleaning methods has been performed. The proposed adaptive method of noise cleaning without using specialized apparatus means and subsidiary information is able to operate in the real time conditions. The testing of the developed algorithm using the metrics of segment NC and PESQ have shown the high efficiency of the development and its superiority to common noise cleaning implementations Speex and WebRTC with respect to the noise cleaning quality and operation speed.

Hippocrates Now: The “Father of Medicine” in the Internet Age by Helen King

Reviewed by: Hippocrates Now: The “Father of Medicine” in the Internet Age by Helen King Elizabeth Craik Helen King. Hippocrates Now: The “Father of Medicine” in the Internet Age. Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. ix + 262 pp. Ill. $170.00 (978-1-350-00589-1). This is an unusual book deploying an unusual skill set, equally at home in a library and online. It is stated at the outset that the “main resource has been the internet, supplemented by the Wellcome Collection in London”; for some books “second-hand copies sourced online” proved more economical than travel to libraries (p. 14). An admirably lucid short introduction (pp. 1–16) sets out the subject and scope of the work (broadly, the reception of Hippocrates) and outlines the intended approach (to examine knowledge or purported knowledge in past and present). Chapter 1, “What We Know about Hippocrates” (p. 17), consists arrestingly of just twenty-four words: “Hippocrates lived in classical Greece and was associated with the island of Cos. He gained a reputation as a writer and a medical doctor”; chapter. 2, “What We Thought We Knew” (pp. 19–41), and with it chapter 3, “Sabotaging the Story: What Hippocrates Didn’t Write” (pp. 43–66), raise fundamental questions of Hippocratic authorship and the nature of the corpus known as “Hippocratic.” There is a certain dissonance between these three chapters, essentially derivative in content, based on current scholarly consensus, and the more novel thrust of the ensuing chapters addressing material drawn from the internet. Chapter 4, “Needing a Bit of Information: Hippocrates in the News” (pp. 67–94), examines current news stories with particular reference to medical ethics and the putative importance of the oath. Chapter 5, “Hippocrates in Quotes” (pp. 95–110), explores sayings commonly attributed to Hippocrates, but often wrongly, or out of context, or with slanted interpretations. Chapter 6, “Let Food Be Thy Medicine” (pp. 111–32), examines a salient instance of the use and misuse of one such saying. Chapter 7, “The Holistic Hippocrates: Treating the Patient, Not Just the Disease” (pp. 133–53) turns to the appropriation by holistic medicine of supposed Hippocratic principles. A final section, “Conclusion: Strange Remedies” (pp. 155–59), is a meditation on Hippocrates as an ideal, with a perennial appeal, that paradoxically rests on its intrinsic fluidity. [End Page 115] It was ambitious to begin the book with “the question of what, if anything, Hippocrates wrote” (p. 21). The topic has been and remains fundamental (reflected in the theme of the next International Hippocratic Colloquium, scheduled for Munich, October 2021: “The Hippocratic Corpus—Unity in Diversity?”). King’s treatment is worthy but marred by oversimplification. In particular the recurrent description of the corpus as a “collection of . . . treatises” (p. 19 initially; p. 31 on their number) misleadingly lumps together texts with literary pretensions and compilations of various kinds (p. 25, term “treatises” misapplied to Coan Prognoses and Epidemics). But there is commendable awareness of “lost texts and oral traditions” (p. 35); also the letters and apocrypha get some passing attention (pp. 36 and 39). Cos and Cnidos are present (p. 29, etc.) but not Italy and Sicily, or Thracian Abdera, and questions of scientific priority are ignored. The rest of the book, on contemporary uses of Hippocrates, does not disappoint. The content of Wikipedia is laid bare and found wanting. Myths both about events in Hippocrates’s life and about elements in his work are exposed. The extraordinary power of selective repetition in online presentation, as sites uncritically copy sites, is illumined. We are made uncomfortably aware that all this is just the “tip of a very large iceberg” (p. 131). The style is engaging and accessible, sometimes colloquial. The notes are replete with subsidiary information and supplementary bibliographical material. The bibliography itself is full and helpful. Greek makes a sporadic appearance (as in a Galenic citation, p. 119). There are some well-judged portraits of Hippocrates (pp. 10–11), but the cover image of Hippocrates with smartphone in hand is not one of them. It is stated at the outset that Hippocrates is still a point of reference in all sorts of medical debates (p. 4) and at...

Group Affiliation and Default Prediction

Using a large sample of business groups from more than 100 countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group support represents an off-balance sheet asset for the receiving firm and an off-balance sheet liability for the firm offering support. We find that subsidiary information improves parent default prediction over and above group-level consolidated information possibly because intragroup exposures are netted out upon consolidation. Moreover, we document that improvements in parent default prediction decrease in the extent of parent-country financial reporting transparency, a finding that suggests that within-group information matters most when consolidated financial statements are expected to be of lower quality. We also show that parent and other group-firms’ default risk exhibits predictive power for subsidiary default. Lastly, we find that within-group information explains cross-sectional variation in CDS spreads. Taken together, our findings contribute to the prior literature on default prediction and have direct relevance to investors, credit-rating agencies, and accounting regulators. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

Iron contamination of FCC catalysts: Quantification of different crystalline phases and valence states

Amongst the contaminant transition metals that deposit onto the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) catalyst, iron is well-known for its accumulation on the outer surface, negatively affecting accessibility of reactants to the interior of the porous particles and even causing fluidization problems in the circulating unit. Earlier studies have been dedicated to understand the complex deposition mechanism of iron in FCC particles, but only a few was devoted to determine the crystalline phases and the valence states of the deposited Fe during its operation under alternate redox conditions. Besides, the co-existing structural iron in the manufactured catalyst (fresh) makes such studies even more challenging. To better elucidate this field, we present in this paper a combined investigation using X-ray fluorescence (XRF), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and Mössbauer spectroscopy (MS) in fresh, artificially metalized samples and deactivated catalysts collected from the industrial FCC process (E-cat). Using as subsidiary information the characterization of fresh and laboratory impregnated samples submitted to different redox environments at 750 °C, the investigation of E-cats from two refineries working in partial and full burn regeneration mode allowed us to conclude that contaminant iron is mostly deposited as maghemite (γ-Fe2O3) with spinel structure in both its forms: the ferrimagnetic and the superparamagnetic phase, this latter associated to nanosized crystals. The structural Fe(III) in meta-kaolinite from the original catalyst is mostly transformed to Fe(II), indicating that in real FCC unit the regeneration conditions are not severe enough to fully oxidize the Fe species formed in the reductive conditions of the FCC cracking step. Moreover, evidences suggested that the ferrimagnetic form of maghemite is preferentially formed in the reaction zone and it is more or less converted in the regenerator into the superparamagnetic species, more resistant to the oxidizing condition.

Brief analysis of the best practice guideline by Registered Nurse's Association of Ontario—Facilitating Client Centred Learning (2012)

Effective mastery of disease-related knowledge and skills plays a positive role in the good outcomes of patients. However, the complex hygiene and health environment and the specialized health information and service accessible to patients make it difficult for patients with different health awareness to master relevant knowledge or skills effectively. Registered Nurse's Association of Ontario (RNAO) proposed the best practice guideline-Facilitating Client Centred Learning based on the social construction theory and the best evidence available. This paper tries to analyze the guideline briefly from its development group, scope of application, subject content, quality evaluation, subsidiary information and preliminary application. Key words: Guidebooks; Facilitating Client Centred Learning; Brief analysis

The incremental informativeness of public subsidiary earnings

PurposeThis study aims to investigate how holding public subsidiaries affects the information environment of consolidated entities in Germany.Design/methodology/approachThe sample consists of German consolidated entities that are traded on major German stock exchanges over the fiscal years 2005-2012 and hold subsidiaries with public common equity. The informativeness of earnings, defined as the association between earnings and returns, is used to investigate how holding public subsidiaries affects the information environment of consolidated entities.FindingsFindings suggest that public subsidiary earnings are incrementally informative about consolidated entity returns beyond both consolidated and segment earnings reported by consolidated entities in Germany. An investigation into the factors that affect the incremental informativeness of public subsidiary earnings reveals that public subsidiary earnings are more incrementally informative when, compared to the consolidated entity, they are relatively large, have dissimilar growth prospects and are from the same country (i.e. Germany).Practical implicationsThese findings suggest that this disclosure is useful to investors and that this type of disclosure could be valuable to adopt in other countries that do not have this disclosure requirement.Originality/valueThese findings contribute to the streams of literature that: investigate ways that regulators can improve the information environment of corporations, compare the informativeness of accounting measures and investigate the informativeness of subsidiary information.

Group Affiliation and Default Prediction

Using a large sample of business groups from several countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms typically support each other when in financial distress. Potential group support represents an off-balance sheet asset for the receiving firm and an off-balance sheet liability for the firm offering support. We find that subsidiary information improves parent default prediction over and above group-level consolidated information possibly because intra-group exposures are netted out upon consolidation. Moreover, we document that the improvements in parent default prediction are decreasing in the extent of parent-country financial reporting transparency which suggests that within-group information matters most when the consolidated financial statements are expected to be of lower quality. We also show that parent and other group-firms’ default risk exhibits predictive power for subsidiary default. Lastly, we find that within-group information explains cross-sectional variation in CDS spreads. Taken together, our findings contribute to prior literature on default prediction and have direct relevance to investors, credit-rating agencies and accounting regulators.

Causality modeling for directed disease network.

Causality between two diseases is valuable information as subsidiary information for medicine which is intended for prevention, diagnostics and treatment. Conventional cohort-centric researches are able to obtain very objective results, however, they demands costly experimental expense and long period of time. Recently, data source to clarify causality has been diversified: available information includes gene, protein, metabolic pathway and clinical information. By taking full advantage of those pieces of diverse information, we may extract causalities between diseases, alternatively to cohort-centric researches. In this article, we propose a new approach to define causality between diseases. In order to find causality, three different networks were constructed step by step. Each step has different data sources and different analytical methods, and the prior step sifts causality information to the next step. In the first step, a network defines association between diseases by utilizing disease-gene relations. And then, potential causalities of disease pairs are defined as a network by using prevalence and comorbidity information from clinical results. Finally, disease causalities are confirmed by a network defined from metabolic pathways. The proposed method is applied to data which is collected from database such as MeSH, OMIM, HuDiNe, KEGG and PubMed. The experimental results indicated that disease causality that we found is 19 times higher than that of random guessing. The resulting pairs of causal-effected diseases are validated on medical literatures. http://www.alphaminers.net shin@ajou.ac.kr Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Discovering Weighted Calendar-Based Temporal Relationship Rules using Frequent Pattern Tree

The advent of data mining approach has brought many fascinating situations and several challenges to database community. The objective of data mining is to explore the unseen patterns in data, which are valid, novel, potentially subsidiary and ultimately understandable. The authorize and real-time transactional databases often show temporal feature and time validity life-span. Utilizing temporal relationship rule mining one may determine unusual relationship rules regarding different time-intervals. Some relationship rules may hold, through some intervals while not others and this may lead to subsidiary information. Using calendar mined patterns has already been projected by researchers to confine the time-validity relationships. However, when we consider the weight factor like utility of item in transactions and if we incorporate this weight factor in our model to mine then fascinating results of relationships come on time–variant data. This manuscript propose a narrative procedure to find relationship rule on time-variant-weighted data utilizing frequent pattern tree-hierarchical structures which give us a consequential benefit in expressions of time and memory-recollection utilization though including time and weight factor.

The interactional history of examples and parentheses

In this article, we set out to examine how participants organize their note-taking while engaged in multiparty interaction. We first describe the collective display of affiliation as an interactional practice that allows note-takers to identify recordables and to legitimize their writing. We then focus on the use of examples (e.g.) and parentheses in the written notes. While style guides recommend the use of examples and parentheses to indicate subsidiary information, we describe the interactional history that leads to such scriptorial practices in collaborative writing. The analyses show that both examples and parentheses may originate from various interactional practices (e.g. listing, instruction, epistemic disputes) and that they may relate to highly salient topics of the interaction. We use the methods developed in conversation analysis, which we extend to the analysis of multimodal phenomena of interaction.

Perspectives on the design and methodology of periconceptional nutrient supplementation trials.

Periconceptional supplementation could extend the period over which maternal and fetal nutrition is improved, but there are many challenges facing early-life intervention studies. Periconceptional trials differ from pregnancy supplementation trials, not only because of the very early or pre-gestational timing of nutrient exposure but also because they generate subsidiary information on participants who remain non-pregnant. The methodological challenges are more complex although, if well designed, they provide opportunities to evaluate concurrent hypotheses related to the health of non-pregnant women, especially nulliparous adolescents. This review examines the framework of published and ongoing randomised trial designs. Four cohorts typically arise from the periconceptional trial design — two of which are non-pregnant and two are pregnant — and this structure provides assessment options related to pre-pregnant, maternal, pregnancy and fetal outcomes. Conceptually the initial decision for single or micronutrient intervention is central — as is the choice of dosage and content — in order to establish a comparative framework across trials, improve standardisation, and facilitate interpretation of mechanistic hypotheses. Other trial features considered in the review include: measurement options for baseline and outcome assessments; adherence to long-term supplementation; sample size considerations in relation to duration of nutrient supplementation; cohort size for non-pregnant and pregnant cohorts as the latter is influenced by parity selection; integrating qualitative studies and data management issues. Emphasis is given to low resource settings where high infection rates and the possibility of nutrient-infection interactions may require appropriate safety monitoring. The focus is on pragmatic issues that may help investigators planning a periconceptional trial.

Novel Synchronization and BER Improvement Method for Public Safety Mobile Communication Systems Employing Heterogeneous Cognitive Radio

In this paper, a novel synchronization method is proposed for a heterogeneous cognitive radio that combines public safety mobile communication systems (PMCSs) with commercial mobile wireless communication systems (CMWCSs). The proposed method enables self-synchronization of the PMCSs as well as co-synchronization of PMCSs and CMWCSs. In this paper, the self-synchronization indicates that each system obtains own timing synchronization. The co-synchronization indicates that a system recognizes data transmitted from other systems correctly. In our research, we especially focus on PMCS self-synchronization because it is one of the most difficult parts of our proposed cognitive radio that improves PMCS's communication quality. The proposed method is utilized for systems employing differentially encoded π/4 shift QPSK modulation. The synchronization can be achieved by correlating envelopes calculated from a PMCS's received signals with subsidiary information (SI) sent via a CMWCS. In this paper, the performance of the proposed synchronization method is evaluated by computer simulation. Moreover, because this SI can also be used to improve the bit error rate (BER) of PMCSs, BER improvement and efficient SI sending methods are derived, after which their performance is evaluated.

DICOM Metadata Access, Consolidation and Usage in Radiology Department Performance Analysis. A Non-proprietary Approach

Abstract In a clinical environment are produced on daily basis huge volumes of information. In the radiology context, the realization of an increasing number of studies, in particular those associated with modalities that produce huge amounts of images, has given rise to large PACS archives. Proprietary tools available for the analysis of the stored information are limited and usually do not allow efficient analysis of the radiology department performance. In this work we demonstrate that with seamless access to DICOM metadata we can provide a consolidated view of departmental production data regardless of the heterogeneous imaging sources and subsidiary information systems. With our non-proprietary approach it is therefore feasible to conceive indicators that may be included in wider scope institutional performance evaluation. The results from the consolidated DICOM information analysis of more than 20 million images, belonging to more than 467 thousand studies performed on more than 162 thousand patients, justify the relevance of the implementation of similar methodologies in order to optimize the management of Radiology departments.

Application of GIS System in City Gas Pipe Network

The GIS system is a computer system consisting of software, hardware, and to describe the geographic information,and subsidiary information data. The underground gas pipeline is a new application field of GIS system, realizes the electronic and information technology infrastructure information management of gas pipe network, as the transmission and distribution scheduling, document management, network planning, network provides modern means of emergency decision, the daily operation management, construction management and auxiliary decision and other gas.

Subsidiary Structure, Information, and Attention

Subsidiary Structure, Information, and Attention

MODIS 영상자료를 이용한 관개시기 탐지와 논 피복지도 제작

벼는 전 세계 주요 식량 자원 중 하나이며, 특히 아시아 지역에서 벼 경작이 활발히 이루어지고 있다. 벼를 경작하기 위한 논은 다른 작물과 달리 모내기전에 논에 물을 가둬두며, 많은 양의 물이 관개용수로 사용된다. 따라서 신뢰도 있는 관개시기 및 논의 탐지는 효율적인 수자원 관리 및 물 수지 분석을 위해 반드시 필요한 요소이다. 본 연구에서는 MODIS 자료로부터 산출된 개선된 식생지수(Enhanced Vegetation Index, EVI)와 지표수분지수(Land Surface Water Index, LSWI)를 활용하여 관개시기와 논의 공간분포탐지를 실시했다. 한국의 이천 연구지와 일본 Mase 연구지를 대상으로 MODIS 기반의 관개시기 탐지 결과 관측자료와 각각 1일과 8일정도의 차이를 나타냈다. 이 결과는 MODIS 8일 단위 자료의 오차범위 내에서 신뢰도 있는 관개시기 탐지 결과를 나타낸 것으로 판단된다. 또한 관개시기 탐지 결과를 토대로 한국 전체를 대상으로 MODIS 기반의 논을 탐지하고 환경부 토지피복도의 논과 비교하였다. 그 결과, 논이 넓게 분포한 지역에서는 MODIS가 과대평가하는 결과를 나타냈으며, 규모가 작은 논에 대해서는 과소평가하는 결과를 나타냈다. 이는 MODIS 자료의 공간해상도(500m)가 한국 논의 규모를 표현할 정도로 세밀하지 못한 점과 산림, 도시, 호수 및 강 등을 제거하는 과정에서 오차가 발생했을 것으로 판단된다. 또한 Xiao et al.(2005)이 제안한 LSWI에 대한 임계값(+0.05)은 중국을 대상으로 개발된 값으로, 한국 논의 토지피복 복잡성을 잘 반영하지 못하여 오차를 발생시킨 것으로 사료된다. 따라서 신뢰도 있는 관개시기 및 논 탐지를 위해서는 한국 논의 규모 및 토지피복의 이질성을 체계적으로 고려한 LSWI의 임계값을 개발하여 적용할 필요가 있다. Rice is one of the world's staple foods. Paddy rice fields have unique biophysical characteristics that the rice is grown on flooded soils unlike other crops. Information on the spatial distribution of paddy fields and the timing of irrigation are of importance to determine hydrological balance and efficiency of water resource management. In this paper, we detected the timing of irrigation and spatial distribution of paddy fields using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor onboard the NASA EOS Aqua satellite. The timing of irrigation was detected by the combined use of MODIS-based vegetation index and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI). The detected timing of irrigation showed good agreement with field observations from two flux sites in Korea and Japan. Based on the irrigation detection, a land cover map of paddy fields was generated with subsidiary information on seasonal patterns of MODIS enhanced vegetation index (EVI). When the MODISbased paddy field map was compared with a land cover map from the Ministry of Environment, Korea, it overestimated the regions with large paddies but underestimated those with small and fragmented paddies. Potential reasons for such spatial discrepancies may be attributed to coarse pixel resolution (500 m) of MODIS images, uncertainty in parameterization of threshold values for discarding forest and water pixels, and the application of LSWI threshold value developed for paddy fields in China. Nevertheless, this study showed that an improved utilization of seasonal patterns of MODIS vegetation and water-related indices could be applied in water resource management and enhanced estimation of evapotranspiration from paddy fields.

Modelling uncertainty of a land management map derived from a time series of satellite images

The agricultural management practice of leaving land fallow during winter is a key pressure on ground water quality in Canterbury, New Zealand. This is because any nitrate present is likely to be leached down through the soil profile since there is no plant uptake. Remote sensing imagery has been successfully used to identify land with low potential for nitrate uptake due to having bare soil or dead vegetation for significant periods in winter and early spring. This was achieved by use of classification rules on a time series of three 20–30-m resolution satellite images. Our rules are based on percentage live vegetation cover, so a regression relationship between percentage live vegetation cover (from field data) and a satellite-image-derived vegetation index was derived. This paper describes the rules and analyses the sources of error in this low-nitrate-uptake land classification process. The objective was to provide a low-nitrate-uptake map that included uncertainty, and to determine the most significant error source, a task made more difficult due to a lack of reference data. Sources of error include suitability of the logical model, timing of image acquisition, incorrect reference data, geometric errors between images, and radiometric variation both within and between images (month to month and year to year). A pragmatic approach was adopted where each potential error source was systematically examined in turn, quantified where possible, and combined to produce a map indicating where predictions were less reliable or certain. This approach is suitable for situations where there is very limited reference data and more quantitative approaches cannot be applied. It has the advantage of using subsidiary information about errors, and produces spatial information on uncertainty for end users, albeit qualitative and very dependent on expert opinion. The most significant source of uncertainty in the rule-based maps of low nitrate uptake was missing images or too large an interval between images.