Fish -- More Than Just Another Commodity

This brief highlights the contribution of wild capture fisheries to nutritional security in fish dependent developing countries. It is intended to stimulate debate around two broad themes: (1) when should the focus of fisheries policies be on local food security and human well-being as opposed to revenue generation, and (2) how does the current research agenda, with its emphasis on environmental and economic issues, assist or impair decision making processes

Do jumbo-CD holders care about anything?

Uninsured deposits represent a theoretically appealing but relatively untested alternative to subordinated debt for incorporating market discipline into banking supervision. To make the deposit market a useful supervisory tool, it is necessary to know what types of risk are priced by depositors and in what proportions. Using a clustering technique to select from among a large set of potential regressors, as well as a carefully chosen set of control variables, we attempt to determine the types of risk that cause uninsured depositors to react in both the price and quantity dimensions. As a benchmark for economic significance, we estimate similar regressions on supervisory ratings. We find that, in contrast to government supervisors, depositors have not priced most types of risk since 1997. Indeed, the only risk variables that consistently come up as statistically significant are those that measure capital adequacy. Our interpretation of these results is that, because aggregate banking conditions are good, it is not worth depositors' effort to investigate individual bank quality very carefully. We conclude that, in the current economic and regulatory environment, the market is content to delegate most of its monitoring and discipline to the government. To the extent that it does monitor, it only monitors capital. The jumbo-CD market is thus not likely to be of much supervisory use, particularly given that examiners already have good information about capital levels. The depositor emphasis on capital also supports the conjecture that market discipline was responsible for much of the recent capital build-up.Bank deposits ; Bank supervision

A cohort study of the effectiveness of influenza vaccine in older people, performed using the United Kingdom general practice research database.

BACKGROUND: The effectiveness of influenza vaccination against hospitalization and death can only ethically be assessed in observational studies. A concern is that individuals who are vaccinated are healthier than individuals who are not vaccinated, potentially biasing estimates of effectiveness upward. METHODS: We conducted a historical cohort study of individuals >64 years of age, for whom there were data available in the General Practice Research Database for 1989 to 1999 in England and Wales. Rates of admissions for acute respiratory diseases and rates of death due to respiratory disease were compared over 692,819 person-years in vaccine recipients and 1,534,280 person-years in vaccine nonrecipients. RESULTS: The pooled effectiveness of vaccine against hospitalizations for acute respiratory disease was 21% (95% confidence interval [CI], 17%-26%). The rate reduction attributable to vaccination was 4.15 hospitalizations/100,000 person-weeks in the influenza season. Among vaccine recipients, no important reduction in the number of admissions to the hospital was seen outside influenza seasons. The pooled effectiveness of vaccine against deaths due to respiratory disease was 12% (95% CI, 8%-16%). A greater proportionate reduction was seen among people without medical disorders, but absolute rate reduction was higher in individuals with medical disorders, compared with individuals without such disorders (6.14 deaths due to respiratory disease/100,000 person-weeks vs. 3.12 deaths due to respiratory disease/100,000 person-weeks). Clear protection against death due to all causes was not seen. CONCLUSIONS: Influenza vaccination reduces the number of hospitalizations and deaths due to respiratory disease, after correction for confounding in individuals >64 years of age who had a high risk or a low risk for influenza. For elderly people, untargeted influenza vaccination is of confirmed benefit against serious outcomes

Imaging and spectroscopy using a scintillator-coupled EMCCD

The CCD97 is a low light level (L3) device from e2v technologies range of electron multiplying CCDs (EMCCDs). The device uses e2v's patented extended gain register and through the use of appropriately designed electrodes can be used to maximise the signal whilst keeping the impact of the noise to a minimum. The nature of this device makes it ideal for use with a scintillator in order to see individual flashes of light from single X-ray photons. Through the examination of individual X-ray events, it is possible to analyse each interaction in the scintillator to determine the sub-pixel position of the interaction. Using the modelling capabilities of the Geant4 toolkit it is possible to simulate X-ray events and thus examine interactions with known energy and point of interaction. Through bringing together the experimental and simulated results, the spectral capabilities of such a device are discussed

Control of polymorphism in coronene by the application of magnetic fields

Coronene, a polyaromatic hydrocarbon, has been crystallized for the first time in a different polymorph using a crystal growth method that utilizes magnetic fields to access a unit cell configuration that was hitherto unknown. Crystals grown in magnetic field of 1 T are larger, have a different appearance to those grown in zero field and retain their structure in ambient conditions. We identify the new form, beta-coronene, as the most stable at low temperatures. As a result of the new supramolecular configuration we report significantly altered electronic, optical and mechanical properties.Comment: 32 pages, 17 figure

Co-designed Land-use Scenarios and their Implications for Storm Runoff and Streamflow in New England

Landscape and climate changes have the potential to create or exacerbate problems with stormwater management, high flows, and flooding. In New England, four plausible land-use scenarios were co-developed with stakeholders to give insight to the effects on ecosystem services of different trajectories of socio-economic connectedness and natural resource innovation. With respect to water, the service of greatest interest to New England stakeholders is the reduction of stormwater and flooding. To assess the effects of these land-use scenarios, we applied the Soil and Water Assessment Tool to two watersheds under two climates. Differences in land use had minimal effects on the water balance but did affect high flows and the contribution of storm runoff to streamflow. For most scenarios, the effect on high flows was small. For one scenario—envisioned to have global socio-economic connectedness and low levels of natural resource innovation—growth in impervious areas increased the annual maximum daily flow by 10%, similar to the 5–15% increase attributable to climate change. Under modest population growth, land-use decisions have little effect on storm runoff and high flows; however, for the two scenarios characterized by global socio-economic connectedness, differences in choices regarding land use and impervious area have a large impact on the potential for flooding. Results also indicate a potential interaction between climate and land use with a shift to more high flows resulting from heavy rains than from snowmelt. These results can help inform land use and development, especially when combined with assessments of effects on other ecosystem services

Raising the Sunken Billions: A New Model to Finance Fisheries Reform

The Fisheries Policy Brief supports the following key messsages.Improving the governance and management of fisheries exploitation is the principal means of securing the contribution wild capture fisheries to food security.The fisheries policies of tomorrow need to include not only data on environmental issues and fisheries resources, but also be complemented with research data on the patterns and dynamics of fish trade, value chains and end user consumption.To distribute the benefits of fishing more equitably, the responsibility for management and decision making should be devolved to the level where the incentives for fisheries to meet the widest community objectives are highest.For fisheries reform and policy implementation to be successful, primacy should be given to honest inclusive stakeholder dialogue.As fisheries do not exist in isolation, multi-sectoral perspectives and approaches need to be developed and supported

Enhancing thermal properties of asphalt materials for heat storage and transfer applications

The paper considers extending the role of asphalt concrete pavements to become solar heat collectors and storage systems. The majority of the construction cost is already procured for such pavements and only marginal additional costs are likely to be incurred to add the necessary thermal features. Asphalt concrete pavements are, therefore, designed that incorporate aggregates and additives such as limestone, quartzite, lightweight aggregate, copper slag and copper fibre to make them more conductive, or more insulative, or to enable them to store more heat energy. The resulting materials are assessed for both mechanical and thermal properties by laboratory tests and numerical simulations and recommendations are made in regard to the optimum formulations for the purposes considered

Influence of the thermophysical properties of pavement materials on the evolution of temperature depth profiles in different climatic regions

The paper summarizes the relative influence of different pavement thermo-physical properties on the thermal response of pavement cross-sections, and how their relative behaviour changes in different climatic regions. A simplified one-dimensional heat flow modelling tool was developed to achieve this using a finite difference solution method for studying the dynamic temperature profile within pavement constructions. This approach allows for a wide variety and daily varying climatic conditions to be applied, where limited or historic thermo-physical material properties are available, and permits the thermal behaviour of the pavement layers to be accurately modelled and modified. The model was used with available thermal pavement materials properties and with properties determined specifically for the study reported here. The pavement materials included in the study comprised both conventional bituminous and cementicious mixes as well as unconventional mixtures that allowed a wide range of densities, thermal conductivities, specific heat capacities and thermal diffusivities to be investigated. Initially, the model was validated against in-situ pavement data collected in the USA in five widely differing climatic regions. It was found to give results at least as good as others available from more computationally expensive approaches such as 2D and 3D FE commercial packages. Then the model was used to compute the response for the same locations had the thermal properties been changed by using some of the unconventional pavement materials been used. This revealed that reduction of temperature range by several degrees was easily possible (with implications for reduction of rutting, fatigue and the Urban Heat Island effect) and that depth of penetration of peak temperatures was also achievable (with implications for winter freeze-thaw). However, the results showed that there was little opportunity to displace the peak temperatures in time

Religion in Tamang society: A Buddhist community in northern Nepal.

This thesis examines the interrelationship of the religious rituals, beliefs and specialists of a Tamang community in northern Nepal, where a variant of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism ('Lamaism') is found in tandem with Hindu festivals and an array of traditional tribal beliefs and practices including shamanism. A comprehensive account is first given of the community, including its economic basis and social structure. Particular attention is paid to household composition and the domestic cycle, and to clan and lineage structures. The importance of ritual in strengthening social bonds is noted, as is the way in which utilitarian activities are subordinated to religious values and ordered according to symbolic ideas of time and space. Three ritual modes are then described and discussed. First, those concerned with the protection of the individual and the community, either by appeals to the traditional village guardians or by invoking the Buddhist protective deities. Second, the use of exorcism to expel evil, personified as the demons and witches believed to cause illness, misfortune and death. Third, rituals which, by means of offerings to the high Buddhist deities, seek access to their divine power and compassion in order to transform the worshippers. In the course of this account the religious ideas which structure the rituals are encountered, as are the symbolic forms through which they are realised. Then the selection, training and empowerment of religious specialists are examined, as is their role as mediators between men and the gods. Finally, the different religious complexes are shown to be linked by common procedures and strategies for dealing with external threats to individual and communal well-being - and hence in competition with one another, but differentiated and opposed by their attitude towards traditional authority. Additionally they are hierarchically ordered in terms of values and moral range