Can the Private Sector be Competitive and Contribute to Development through Sustainable Agricultural Business? A Case Study of Coffee in Latin America

Latin America's coffee market continues in economic crisis. Sustainable coffee production and certification is one option for economic recuperation and social and environmental sustainability for the region's coffee producers. This paper explores four viable certification processes (Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and Utz Kapeh) by first defining their requirements. Then, an assessment of microeconomic impacts is given, where the production processes of sustainable and conventional coffee are evaluated and compared. Finally, the paper presents their future relevance and entrepreneurial potential by considering long-term market perspectives. Information about sustainable production in Latin America was gathered through primary sources in interviews and markets analyses conducted by the CIMS Foundation.Sustainable coffee, Certification, Economics, Central America, Agribusiness,

Curly arrows meet electron density transfers in chemical reaction mechanisms: from electron localization function (ELF) analysis to valence-shell electron-pair repulsion (VSEPR) inspired interpretation

Probing the electron density transfers during a chemical reaction can provide important insights, making possible to understand and control chemical reactions. This aim has required extensions of the relationships between the traditional chemical concepts and the quantum mechanical ones. The present work examines the detailed chemical insights that have been generated through 100 years of work worldwide on G. N. Lewis's ground breaking paper on The Atom and the Molecule (Lewis, G. N. The Atom and the Molecule, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1916, 38, 762–785), with a focus on how the determination of reaction mechanisms can be reached applying the bonding evolution theory (BET), emphasizing how curly arrows meet electron density transfers in chemical reaction mechanisms and how the Lewis structure can be recovered. BET that combines the topological analysis of the electron localization function (ELF) and Thom's catastrophe theory (CT) provides a powerful tool providing insight into molecular mechanisms of chemical rearrangements. In agreement with physical laws and quantum theoretical insights, BET can be considered as an appropriate tool to tackle chemical reactivity with a wide range of possible applications. Likewise, the present approach retrieves the classical curly arrows used to describe the rearrangements of chemical bonds for a given reaction mechanism, providing detailed physical grounds for this type of representation. The ideas underlying the valence-shell-electron pair-repulsion (VSEPR) model applied to non-equilibrium geometries provide simple chemical explanations of density transfers. For a given geometry around a central atom, the arrangement of the electronic domain may comply or not with the VSEPR rules according with the valence shell population of the considered atom. A deformation yields arrangements which are either VSEPR defective (at least a domain is missing to match the VSEPR arrangement corresponding to the geometry of the ligands), VSEPR compliant or pseudo VSEPR when the position of bonding and non-bonding domains are interchanged. VSEPR defective arrangements increase the electrophilic character of the site whereas the VSEPR compliant arrangements anticipate the formation of a new covalent bond. The frequencies of the normal modes which account for the reaction coordinate provide additional information on the succession of the density transfers. This simple model is shown to yield results in very good agreement with those obtained by BET.We wish to thank Professors R. J. Gillespie, Henry H. Rzepa and Patrick Chaquin and L. R. Domingo for stimulating discussions and the referees for their very constructive comment

Supersymmetric traversable wormholes

We study traversable wormhole solutions in pure gauged $N\!=\!2$ supergravity with and without electromagnetic fields, which are locally isometric under $\mathrm{SO}(2,1)\!\times\!\mathrm{SO}(1,1)$. The model allows for 1/2-BPS wormhole solutions whose corresponding globally defined Killing spinors are presented. A non-contractible cycle can be obtained by compactifying one of the coordinates which leaves the residual supersymmetry unaffected, the isometry group is now globally $\mathrm{SO}(2,1)\!\times\!\mathrm{SO}(2)$. The wormholes connect two asymptotic, locally $\mathrm{AdS}_4$ regions and depend on certain electric and magnetic charge parameters and, implicitly, on the range of the compact coordinate around the throat. We provide an analysis of the boundary of the spacetime and show that it can be either disconnected or not, depending on the values of the parameters in the metric. Finally, we show how that these space-times avoid a topological censorship theorem.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures. Published version with a detailed analysis of the boundary and a general proof on the circumvention of a topological censorship theore

AWARE: Platform for Autonomous self-deploying and operation of Wireless sensor-actuator networks cooperating with unmanned AeRial vehiclEs

This paper presents the AWARE platform that seeks to enable the cooperation of autonomous aerial vehicles with ground wireless sensor-actuator networks comprising both static and mobile nodes carried by vehicles or people. Particularly, the paper presents the middleware, the wireless sensor network, the node deployment by means of an autonomous helicopter, and the surveillance and tracking functionalities of the platform. Furthermore, the paper presents the first general experiments of the AWARE project that took place in March 2007 with the assistance of the Seville fire brigades

An electron localization function and catastrophe theory analysis on the molecular mechanism of gas-phase identity SN2 reactions

A set of four reactions, XCH3+X− (X=F, Cl, Br) and ClSiH3+Cl−, is investigated by means of the joint use of the electron localization function (ELF) and catastrophe theory (CT) analysis in order to obtain newinsights into the bond breaking/forming processes for identity SN2 gas-phase reactions. Using DFT calculations at the OLYP/6-311++G(d,p) level, the effect of nucleophile (F, Cl, and Br anions) and the role of reacting centers (C or Si) on the reaction mechanisms are investigated. The charge-shift character of carbon–halogen bonds is studied by determination of the weights of the Lewis resonance structures. In all SN2 reactions at the carbon atom, there is a progressive reduction on the covalent character of the C–X bond from the reactant complex (0.41, 0.57, 0.58 for F, Cl, and Br, respectively) until the bond-breaking process, occurring before the transition structure is reached. On the other hand, the Si–Cl bond maintains its degree of covalent character (0.51) from the isolated fragments to the formation of a stable transition complex, presenting two silicon– chlorine charge-shifted bonds. The analysis of the ELF topology along the reaction path reveals that all reactions proceed via the same turning points of fold-type but the order is inverted for reactions taking place at C or Si atom

Curly arrows, electron flow, and reaction mechanisms from the perspective of the bonding evolution theory

Despite the usefulness of curly arrows in chemistry, their relationship with real electron density flows is still imprecise, and even their direct connection to quantum chemistry is still controversial. The paradigmatic description – from first principles – of the mechanistic aspects of a given chemical process is based mainly on the relative energies and geometrical changes at the stationary points of the potential energy surface along the reaction pathway; however, it is not sufficient to describe chemical systems in terms of bonding aspects. Probing the electron density distribution during a chemical reaction can provide important insights, enabling us to understand and control chemical reactions. This aim has required an extension of the relationships between the concepts of traditional chemistry and those of quantum mechanics. Bonding evolution theory (BET), which combines the topological analysis of the electron localization function (ELF) and Thom’s catastrophe theory (CT), provides a powerful method that offers insight into the molecular mechanism of chemical rearrangements. In agreement with the laws of physical and aspects of quantum theory, BET can be considered an appropriate tool to tackle chemical reactivity with a wide range of possible applications. In this work, BET is applied to address a long-standing problem: the ability to monitor the flow of electron density. BET analysis shows a connection between quantum mechanics and bond making/forming processes. Likewise, the present approach retrieves the classical curly arrows used to describe the rearrangements of chemical bonds and provides detailed physical grounds for this type of representation. We demonstrate this procedure using the test set of prototypical examples of thermal ring apertures, and the degenerated Cope rearrangement of semibullvalene

Describing the molecular mechanism of organic reactions by using topological analysis of electronic localization function

Here, we provide an essay on the analysis of the reaction mechanism at the molecular level; in particular, the evolution of the electron pair, as it is provided by the ELF, is used to decribe the reaction pathway. Then, the reaction mechanism is determined by the topological changes of the ELF gradient field along a series of structural stability domains. From this analysis, concepts such as bond breaking/forming processes, formation/annihilation of lone pairs and other electron pair rearrangements arise naturally along the reaction progress simply in terms of the different ways of pairing up the electrons. To visualize these results some organic reaction mechanisms (the thermal ring aperture of cyclobutene and cyclohexa-1,3-diene) have been selected, indicating both the generality and utility of this type of analysis

Molecular and functional characterization of a new X-linked chronic granulomatous disease variant (X91+) case with a double missense mutation in the cytosolic gp91phox C-terminal tail

AbstractWe report here two atypical cases of X-linked CGD patients (first cousins) in which cytochrome b558 is present at a normal level but is not functional (X91+). The mutations were localized by single-strand conformational polymorphism of reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction amplified fragments and then identified by sequence analysis. They consisted in two base substitutions (C919 to A and C923 to G), changing His303 to Asn and Pro304 to Arg in the cytosolic gp91phox C-terminal tail. Mismatched polymerase chain reaction and genomic DNA sequencing showed that mothers had both wild-type and mutated alleles, confirming that this case was transmitted in an X-linked fashion. A normal amount of FAD was found in neutrophil membranes, both in the X91+ patients and their parents. Epstein–Barr virus-transformed B lymphocytes from the X91+ patients acidified normally upon stimulation with arachidonic acid, indicating that the mutated gp91phox still functioned as a proton channel. A cell-free translocation assay demonstrated that the association of the cytosolic factors p47phox and p67phox with the membrane fraction was strongly disrupted. We concluded that residues 303 and 304 are crucial for the stable assembly of the NADPH oxidase complex and for electron transfer, but not for its proton channel activity

Structured Prediction Problem Archive

Structured prediction problems are one of the fundamental tools in machine learning. In order to facilitate algorithm development for their numerical solution, we collect in one place a large number of datasets in easy to read formats for a diverse set of problem classes. We provide archival links to datasets, description of the considered problems and problem formats, and a short summary of problem characteristics including size, number of instances etc. For reference we also give a non-exhaustive selection of algorithms proposed in the literature for their solution. We hope that this central repository will make benchmarking and comparison to established works easier. We welcome submission of interesting new datasets and algorithms for inclusion in our archive.Comment: Added multicast instances from Andres grou