7,244 research outputs found
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Food Security Under a Changing Climate: Exploring the Integration of Resilience in Research and Practice
Climate change poses significant risks to our food systems, thus jeopardising the food security of millions of people worldwide. The concept of resilience is increasingly being proposed as a framework to find solutions to these challenges. In this chapter, we assess how resilience has been integrated in discussions about climate change and food security by both academics and practitioners. We performed a targeted review of the academic literature on climate change, food security, and resilience and found that despite a growing body of literature on the subject, the pathways through which actions translate into resilience and then into food security remain unclear. An examination of a sample of projects implemented through the Adaptation Fund revealed that many good practices with potential for resilience-building are used but also that suitable indicators and methods to monitor and evaluate resilience and its outcomes are lacking. Based on our findings, we conclude that while the concept of resilience has accompanied and may have favoured a transition towards more integrated approaches and interventions in work related to climate change and food security, further efforts are needed to identify an efficient and rational sequence of interventions to improve food security in response to climate threats
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
Donor-anion interactions in quarter-filled low-dimensional organic conductors
Anions have often been considered to act essentially as electron donors or acceptors in molecular conductors. However there is now growing evidence that they play an essential role in directing the structural and hence electronic properties of many of these systems. After reviewing the basic interactions and different ground states occurring in molecular conductors we consider in detail how anions influence the structure of donor stacks and often guide them toward different types of transitions. Consideration of the Bechgaard and Fabre salts illustrates how anions play a crucial role in directing these salts through complex phase diagrams where different conducting and localized states are in competition. We also emphasize the important role of hydrogen bonding and conformational flexibility of donors related to BEDT-TTF and we discuss how anions have frequently a strong control of the electronic landscape of these materials. Charge ordering, metal to metal and metal to insulator transitions occurring in these salts are considered
To Be or Not to Be – Review of Electrical Bistability Mechanisms in Polymer Memory Devices
open access articleOrganic memory devices are a rapidly evolving field with much improvement
in device performance, fabrication, and application. But the reports have been
disparate in terms of the material behavior and the switching mechanisms in
the devices. And, despite the advantages, the lack of agreement in regards to
the switching behavior of the memory devices is the biggest challenge that
the field must overcome to mature as a commercial competitor. This lack
of consensus has been the motivation of this work wherein various works
are compiled together to understand influencing factors in the memory
devices. Different works are compared together to discover some clues
about the nature of the switching occurring in the devices, along with some
missing links that would require further investigation. The charge storage
mechanism is critically analyzed alongside the various resistive switching
mechanisms such as filamentary conduction, redox-based switching, metal
oxide switching, and other proposed mechanisms. The factors that affect
the switching process are also analyzed including the effect of nanoparticles,
the effect of the choice of polymer, or even the effect of electrodes on the
switching behavior and the performance parameters of the memory device
Developing automated meta-research approaches in the preclinical Alzheimer's disease literature
Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder for which there is no cure. A crucial part of the drug development pipeline involves testing therapeutic interventions in animal disease models. However, promising findings in preclinical experiments have not translated into clinical trial success. Reproducibility has often been cited as a major issue affecting biomedical research, where experimental results in one laboratory cannot be replicated in another. By using meta-research (research on research) approaches such as systematic reviews, researchers aim to identify and summarise all available evidence relating to a specific research question. By conducting a meta-analysis, researchers can also combine the results from different experiments statistically to understand the overall effect of an intervention and to explore reasons for variations seen across different publications. Systematic reviews of the preclinical Alzheimer’s disease literature could inform decision making, encourage research improvement, and identify gaps in the literature to guide future research. However, due to the vast amount of potentially useful evidence from animal models of Alzheimer’s disease, it remains difficult to make sense of and utilise this data effectively. Systematic reviews are common practice within evidence based medicine, yet their application to preclinical research is often limited by the time and resources required. In this thesis, I develop, build-upon, and implement automated meta-research approaches to collect, curate, and evaluate the preclinical Alzheimer’s literature. I searched several biomedical databases to obtain all research relevant to Alzheimer’s disease. I developed a novel deduplication tool to automatically identify and remove duplicate publications identified across different databases with minimal human effort. I trained a crowd of reviewers to annotate a subset of the publications identified and used this data to train a machine learning algorithm to screen through the remaining publications for relevance. I developed text-mining tools to extract model, intervention, and treatment information from publications and I improved existing automated tools to extract reported measures to reduce the risk of bias. Using these tools, I created a categorised database of research in transgenic Alzheimer’s disease animal models and created a visual summary of this dataset on an interactive, openly accessible online platform. Using the techniques described, I also identified relevant publications within the categorised dataset to perform systematic reviews of two key outcomes of interest in transgenic Alzheimer’s disease models: (1) synaptic plasticity and transmission in hippocampal slices and (2) motor activity in the open field test.
Over 400,000 publications were identified across biomedical research databases, with 230,203 unique publications. In a performance evaluation across different preclinical datasets, the automated deduplication tool I developed could identify over 97% of duplicate citations and a had an error rate similar to that of human performance. When evaluated on a test set of publications, the machine learning classifier trained to identify relevant research in transgenic models performed was highly sensitive (captured 96.5% of relevant publications) and excluded 87.8% of irrelevant publications. Tools to identify the model(s) and outcome measure(s) within the full-text of publications may reduce the burden on reviewers and were found to be more sensitive than searching only the title and abstract of citations. Automated tools to assess risk of bias reporting were highly sensitive and could have the potential to monitor research improvement over time. The final dataset of categorised Alzheimer’s disease research contained 22,375 publications which were then visualised in the interactive web application. Within the application, users can see how many publications report measures to reduce the risk of bias and how many have been classified as using each transgenic model, testing each intervention, and measuring each outcome. Users can also filter to obtain curated lists of relevant research, allowing them to perform systematic reviews at an accelerated pace with reduced effort required to search across databases, and a reduced number of publications to screen for relevance. Both systematic reviews and meta-analyses highlighted failures to report key methodological information within publications. Poor transparency of reporting limited the statistical power I had to understand the sources of between-study variation. However, some variables were found to explain a significant proportion of the heterogeneity. Transgenic animal model had a significant impact on results in both reviews. For certain open field test outcomes, wall colour of the open field arena and the reporting of measures to reduce the risk of bias were found to impact results. For in vitro electrophysiology experiments measuring synaptic plasticity, several electrophysiology parameters, including magnesium concentration of the recording solution, were found to explain a significant proportion of the heterogeneity. Automated meta-research approaches and curated web platforms summarising preclinical research could have the potential to accelerate the conduct of systematic reviews and maximise the potential of existing evidence to inform translation
Epistemologies of possibility: social movements, knowledge production and political transformation
Urgent global problems - whether military conflicts, economic insecurities, immigration controls or mass incarceration-not only call for new modes of political action but also demand new forms of knowledge. For if knowledge frameworks both shape the horizons of social intelligibility and chart t he realms of political possibility, then epistemological interventions constitute a crucial part of social change. Social movements play a key role in this work by engaging in dissident knowledge practices that open up space for political transformation. But what are the processes and conditions through which social movements generate new ways of knowing?'What is politically at stake in the various knowledge strategies that activists use to generate social change? Despite a growing literature on the role of epistemological dimensions of protest, social movement studies tend to neglect specific questions of epistemological change. Often treating knowledge as a resource or object rather than a power relation and a social practice, social movement scholars tend to focus on content rather than production, frames rather than practices, taxonomies rather than processes. Missing is a more dynamic account of the conditions, means and power relations through which transformative knowledge practices come to be constituted and deployed. Seeking to better understand processes of epistemological transformation, this thesis explores the relationship between social movements, knowledge production and political change. Starting from an assumption that knowledge not only represents the world, but also works to constitute it, this thesis examines the role of social movement knowledge practices in shaping the conditions of political possibility. Drawing from the context of grassroots queer, transgender and feminist organizing around issues of prisons and border controls in North America, the project explores how activists generate new forms of knowledge and forge new spaces of political possibility. Working through a series of concepts-transformation, resistance, experience, co-optation, solidarity and analogy - this thesis explores different ways of understanding processes of epistemological change with in social movement contexts. It considers processes that facilitate or enable epistemological change and those that limit or prohibit such change. Bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives, including feminist, queer, critical race and post-structuralist analyses, and drawing on interviews with grassroots activists, the thesis explores what is politically at stake in the different ways we conceptualise, imagine and engage in processes of epistemological change
Intimate shaping: the embodied self and activist therapeutic practices during the Greek economic crisis
The social transformations that have transpired in Greece during the period of the economic crisis have altered the social fabric of living through the imposition of austerity politics, economic hardship, and work insecurity. These social shifts have created complex utterances of loss and vulnerability, but also resistance. This thesis examines the ways in which the self is enveloped and shaped by the power dynamics of the economic crisis and the feelings and experiences that permeate it, in order to advance a deeper understanding of how the crisis becomes embedded into the self. Aiming to identify ways of moving beyond the impasse and hopelessness of precarious living within the crisis, this study also explores the capacities for action and movement that the crisis can generate, in the context of social clinics and the psychotherapeutic practices embedded in them. Social clinics are a grassroots solidarity movement created by volunteer health professionals where practices of care provision and economic activity are performed in ways that challenge the neoliberal and austere.
This thesis creates a theoretical space that can hold together the in-between space of entanglement where the personal meets the economic. Drawing upon Foucauldian and governmental perspectives, I examine subjectification processes within neoliberal realities. Thinking with Judith Butler, I focus upon vulnerability, loss, and dispossession, within the context of the crisis. Through cultural theory, I examine the affective textures of everyday lifeworlds during the crisis. Imagining other worlds and economies, I draw on Gibson-Graham to examine social clinics and the practices they incorporate as activist projects that can unsettle the present economic world.
This thesis employs a critical autoethnographic approach, as I delve into this space of in-betweenness through my own experiences of precarious living, while entangling my stories with those of volunteer psychotherapists who offer their services in social clinics of Athens. By using writing as inquiry and thinking with theory as my analytical approach, I foreground my body as an instrument of research and advance an understanding of theory as an embodied and dynamic process that connects thinking and doing
A decade of action for a change of era
For the fifth time, the countries of the region are convening in the framework of the Forum of the Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean on Sustainable Development. On each occasion, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has presented a report on regional progress and challenges in relation to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Since 2020, efforts to assess progress towards meeting the 2030 Agenda have had to be undertaken amid the constraints imposed by measures to address the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
In this difficult context, ECLAC continued to step up its efforts to assess the progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Whereas in 2019 we only had 19 statistical series of SDG indicators for the region to analyse progress towards 2030, in this fifth report we are presenting the results for 359 series, corresponding to 111 targets, 73 of which are targets covered by the prioritized indicators for the region.
Given the contradiction between, on the one hand, the growing institutional efforts to bring to fruition the Decade of Action of the Sustainable Development Goals called for by the United Nations Secretary-General and his proposal of Our Common Agenda and, on the other, the insufficient progress towards the achievement of the Goals, ECLAC stresses once again its proposal to launch a decade of action for a change of era. The Sustainable Development Goals will not be achieved by doing more of the same; we must move towards a new, inclusive and sustainable economic and social system.
This document presents specific proposals in four areas in which we must continue to work: strengthening multilateralism, particularly in the area of financing for development; improving implementation of productive, social and environmental policies of national and regional scope; building up the resilience of institutions; and overcoming conflicts through agreements and compacts
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