Choice-Disability and HIV Infection: A Cross Sectional Study of HIV Status in Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland

Interpersonal power gradients may prevent people implementing HIV prevention decisions. Among 7,464 youth aged 15–29 years in Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland we documented indicators of choice-disability (low education, educational disparity with partner, experience of sexual violence, experience of intimate partner violence (IPV), poverty, partner income disparity, willingness to have sex without a condom despite believing partner at risk of HIV), and risk behaviours like inconsistent use of condoms and multiple partners. In Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland, 22.9, 9.1, and 26.1% women, and 8.3, 2.8, and 9.3% men, were HIV positive. Among both women and men, experience of IPV, IPV interacted with age, and partner income disparity interacted with age were associated with HIV positivity in multivariate analysis. Additional factors were low education (for women) and poverty (for men). Choice disability may be an important driver of the AIDS epidemic. New strategies are needed that favour the choice-disabled

Psychology and poverty reduction: a global special Issue

A “global special issue” on poverty brought together 9 international psychology journals during 2010 through 2013. The purpose was to highlight psychology’s contribution toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals are rooted in the “capabilities approach” and highlight the importance of fostering environments that support 3 core domains: health, basic education, and income. Here, we analyze what the global special issue contributed. As a whole the global special issue provided an account of “how” psychology engages with poverty and poverty reduction. First, the global special issue, more than other research on poverty, was focused on lower- and middle-income settings. Second, while the content of the articles could be coded into 3 specific domains (health/well-being, education/development, and society/work), the vast majority of the articles straddled more than 1 category. Third, the contents of the global special issue could be organized in terms of the type of contribution: that is, practicality, theory, description, and advocacy. We highlight the importance of addressing wider situational and sociopolitical structures that constrain capability and potential, without losing sight of the person. Psychology might (a) concentrate resources on finding out what actually works to enable poverty reduction; and (b) apply what we know to ensure that research on poverty reduction is more informative and compelling to community stakeholders, organizations, and policymakers. Such an “implementation science” could advance poverty reduction and human development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved

Claiming and adjudicating on Kilimanjaro's shrinking glaciers: Guy Callendar, Al Gore and extended peer communities

Climate change has mutated from being a physical phenomenon to be studied to an idea to be contested. The sites of adjudication between competing truth claims have therefore moved from the secluded academy and scientific peer review to the vociferous agora and the extended peer community. This move is illustrated here using the case of the shrinking glaciers of Mt Kilimanjaro. Both the British engineer Guy Callendar, in 1944, and the American campaigner Al Gore, in 2006, claimed that the primary cause of this glacial recession was rising world temperature. Both were passionate believers in the reality of human-induced global warming, but they had very different resources at their disposal to advance these beliefs. While Callendar’s claim was revealed only to the editor of the science journal Nature, Gore’s claims were visible to millions through his film An Inconvenient Truth. While the force of Callendar’s claim was weighed and adjudicated by one peer reviewer, the validity of Gore’s claim was tested very publicly in the British courts. Both claims about the cause of Kilimanjaro’s retreating glaciers were found wanting. The paper argues that this simple, but powerful, comparison between identical claims-making drawn from two different eras of science, yet with contrasting processes of truth-adjudication, illuminates the different ‘post-normal’ world of science climate change now inhabits. The case study is used to reflect on the role of the extended peer community in establishing and validating scientific knowledge about climate change: who participates, how trust is stabilised and whether science is thereby democratised

Paleogeography and tectono-stratigraphy of carboniferous-Permian and Triassic "Karoo-like" sequences of the congo basin

International audienceThe Congo Basin is a large Phanerozoic sedimentary basin with up to 3–6 km of Carboniferous to Triassic sequences, comparable to those of the Karoo Basins of southern Gondwana. Here, we present a substantially revised stratigraphy for the Congo Basin, based on new field observations, seismic and borehole data, together with paleontology and new geochronology. In the center of the basin, the deepest boreholes intercept 3 to 4 km thick successions of conglomerates and red sandstones that overlie carbonate rocks, which correlate to deformed upper Neoproterozoic (Pan African) platform sequences extending beyond the Congo Basin into the Pan African orogenic zones (e.g. the West Congolian Group). The overlying sequences are dated biostratigraphically to be Carboniferous-Permian (the Lukuga Group) and Triassic (the Haute Lueki Group) in age. A regional erosion surface separates these two groups, possibly related to late Paleozoic intracontinental deformation associated with the Mauritanian-Variscan and Cape-de la Ventana orogens flanking the northwestern and southern margins of Gondwana, respectively. This change in basin paleogeography is consistent with detrital zircons dated from these sequences that suggest the ca. 1.4 Ga Kibaran Belt along the eastern margin of the Congo Basin stopped acting as a major source during the early Mesozoic