AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT: LESSONS FOR CHRISTIAN GROUPS COMBATING PERSISTENT POVERTY

Persistent poverty is one of the core challenges faced by Christians and by development scholars and practitioners alike. There is no question that Jesus was concerned about the poor - both materially and spiritually. From his first public address in the Synagogue in Nazareth, His home town, where He concluded by saying that He had come to "preach good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18), Jesus lived the gospel in word and deed. We, as Christian men and women, whether researchers or practitioners, are called to do no less. When Jesus made His parting remarks to His disciples, He said (John 20:21) "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." emphasizing that we are to do likewise. This concern permeates the Old and New Testament, another example being the words of the prophet Micah (6:8): "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." We are here to think through together some of the implications of this mandate for ourselves as researchers and practitioners. More specifically, to consider how the work we do as researchers can inform our work in the field as practitioners in such a way as to more effectively help those who are materially poor.Community/Rural/Urban Development, O1, Q12, Q18,

Livelihood strategies in the rural Kenyan highlands

The concept of a livelihood strategy has become central to development practice in recent years. Nonetheless, precise identification of livelihoods in quantitative data has remained methodologically elusive. This paper uses cluster analysis methods to operationalize the concept of livelihood strategies in household data and then uses the resulting strategy-specific income distributions to test whether the hypothesized outcome differences between livelihoods indeed exist. Using data from Kenya’s central and western highlands, we identify five distinct livelihood strategies that exhibit statistically significant differences in mean per capita incomes and stochastic dominance orderings that establish clear welfare rankings among livelihood strategies. Multinomial regression analysis identifies geographic, demographic and financial determinants of livelihood choice. The results should facilitate targeting of interventions designed to improve household livelihoods.Livelihood strategy, Kenya, Smallholder agriculture, Cluster analysis, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Conserved defense responses between maize and sorghum to Exserohilum turcicum.

BACKGROUND:Exserohilum turcicum is an important pathogen of both sorghum and maize, causing sorghum leaf blight and northern corn leaf blight. Because the same pathogen can infect and cause major losses for two of the most important grain crops, it is an ideal pathosystem to study plant-pathogen evolution and investigate shared resistance mechanisms between the two plant species. To identify sorghum genes involved in the E. turcicum response, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS). RESULTS:Using the sorghum conversion panel evaluated across three environments, we identified a total of 216 significant markers. Based on physical linkage with the significant markers, we detected a total of 113 unique candidate genes, some with known roles in plant defense. Also, we compared maize genes known to play a role in resistance to E. turcicum with the association mapping results and found evidence of genes conferring resistance in both crops, providing evidence of shared resistance between maize and sorghum. CONCLUSIONS:Using a genetics approach, we identified shared genetic regions conferring resistance to E. turcicum in both maize and sorghum. We identified several promising candidate genes for resistance to leaf blight in sorghum, including genes related to R-gene mediated resistance. We present significant advancements in the understanding of host resistance to E. turcicum, which is crucial to reduce losses due to this important pathogen

Towards the Refinement of Von Neumann Machines

Mathematicians agree that certifiable configurations are an interesting new topic in the field of programming languages, and scholars concur. Given the current status of atomic modalities, programmers dubiously desire the synthesis of replication. In or- der to accomplish this intent, we describe a distributed tool for analyzing context-free grammar (Tor), verifying that the little- known collaborative algorithm for the em- ulation of the Internet by M. Garey et al. [3] is in Co-NP

Strong sea surface cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific and implications for Galápagos Penguin conservation

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 42 (2015): 6432–6437, doi:10.1002/2015GL064456.The Galápagos is a flourishing yet fragile ecosystem whose health is particularly sensitive to regional and global climate variations. The distribution of several species, including the Galápagos Penguin, is intimately tied to upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water along the western shores of the archipelago. Here we show, using reliable, high-resolution sea surface temperature observations, that the Galápagos cold pool has been intensifying and expanding northward since 1982. The linear cooling trend of 0.8°C/33 yr is likely the result of long-term changes in equatorial ocean circulation previously identified. Moreover, the northward expansion of the cold pool is dynamically consistent with a slackening of the cross-equatorial component of the regional trade winds—leading to an equatorward shift of the mean position of the Equatorial Undercurrent. The implied change in strength and distribution of upwelling has important implications for ongoing and future conservation measures in the Galápagos.K.B.K. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the James E. and Barbara V. Moltz Fellowship administered by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Ocean and Climate Change Institute (OCCI), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Physical Oceanography program (grant OCE–1233282). S.J. acknowledges support from WHOI. C.W.B. was supported by the NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research.2016-02-0

Uniting paradigms of connectivity in marine ecology

The connectivity of marine organisms among habitat patches has been dominated by two independent paradigms with distinct conservation strategies. One paradigm is the dispersal of larvae on ocean currents, which suggests networks of marine reserves. The other is the demersal migration of animals from nursery to adult habitats, requiring the conservation of connected ecosystem corridors. Here, we suggest that a common driver, wave exposure, links larval and demersal connectivity across the seascape. To study the effect of linked connectivities on fish abundance at reefs, we parameterize a demographic model for The Bahamas seascape using maps of habitats, empirically forced models of wave exposure and spatially realistic three-dimensional hydrological models of larval dispersal. The integrated empirical-modeling approach enabled us to study linked connectivity on a scale not currently possible by purely empirical studies. We find sheltered environments not only provide greater nursery habitat for juvenile fish but larvae spawned on adjacent reefs have higher retention, thereby creating a synergistic increase in fish abundance. Uniting connectivity paradigms to consider all life stages simultaneously can help explain the evolution of nursery habitat use and simplifies conservation advice: Reserves in sheltered environments have desirable characteristics for biodiversity conservation and can support local fisheries through adult spillover

Loss of Sympathetic Nerves in Spleens From Patients With End Stage Sepsis

The spleen is an important site for central regulation of immune function by noradrenergic sympathetic nerves, but little is known about this major region of neuroimmune communication in humans. Experimental studies using animal models have established that sympathetic innervation of the spleen is essential for cholinergic anti-inflammatory responses evoked by vagal nerve stimulation, and clinical studies are evaluating this approach for treating inflammatory diseases. Most data on sympathetic nerves in spleen derive from rodent studies, and this work has established that remodeling of sympathetic innervation can occur during inflammation. However, little is known about the effects of sepsis on spleen innervation. Our primary goals were to (i) localize noradrenergic nerves in human spleen by immunohistochemistry for tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), a specific noradrenergic marker, (ii) determine if nerves occur in close apposition to leukocytes, and (iii) determine if splenic sympathetic innervation is altered in patients who died from end stage sepsis. Staining for vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT) was done to screen for cholinergic nerves. Archived paraffin tissue blocks were used. Control samples were obtained from trauma patients or patients who died after hemorrhagic stroke. TH + nerves were associated with arteries and arterioles in all control spleens, occurring in bundles or as nerve fibers. Individual TH + nerve fibers entered the perivascular region where some appeared in close apposition to leukocytes. In marked contrast, spleens from half of the septic patients lacked TH + nerves fibers and the average abundance of TH + nerves for the septic group was only 16% of that for the control group (control: 0.272 ± 0.060% area, n = 6; sepsis: 0.043 ± 0.026% area, n = 8; P \u3c 0.005). All spleens lacked cholinergic innervation. Our results provide definitive evidence for the distribution of noradrenergic nerves in normal human spleen and the first evidence for direct sympathetic innervation of leukocytes in human spleen. We also provide the first evidence for marked loss of noradrenergic nerves in patients who died from sepsis. Such nerve loss could impair neuroimmunomodulation and may not be limited to the spleen