Increasing uptake of improved land management practice to benefit environment and landholders: insights through a transaction cost lens

Transaction costs, related to either investigating improved land management practices (ILMP), engaging in adoption support programs for these practices and/or implementing changes on-ground, create barriers to ILMP adoption. Perceived and actual transaction costs have long been hypothesised as a potential barrier to grazier adoption of ILMPs in catchments to the Great Barrier Reef. Applying a framework derived from transaction cost theory, we assess this hypothesis. Through semi-structured interviews of a sample of participants in two ILMP programs, we find that ILMP adoption support program characteristics have a large influence on perceived and actual transaction costs of landholders seeking to engage in ILMP programs or adopt ILMPs. The importance of establishing and nurturing relationships between landholders and extension officers was also highlighted as critical to reducing landholder transaction costs. The degree to which relationships reduce transaction costs demonstrates the importance of fostering landholder leadership in ILMP program design as well as targeted extension in supporting adoption

Anciennes et nouvelles aristocraties

Sans rien ignorer des spécificités de différentes aristocraties, anciennes et nouvelles, et des groupes qui les constituent, les auteurs de cet ouvrage tentent plutôt de les confronter, de rechercher les caractères communs qui les soudent, les différences qui les séparent et, plus encore, les fondements de clivages souvent ambigus entre aristocrates et non-aristocrates. Leur ambition est tout à la fois de présenter des études de cas précises réalisées en France, Grande-Bretagne, Allemagne, Italie, Hongrie, Finlande et Suède, un état des lieux ainsi que des recherches sur les noblesses menées par historiens, anthropologues et sociologues et enfin de proposer une analyse critique et comparative des évolutions de ces noblesses. Quel est le poids du symbolique mais aussi des décrochements politiques dans les transformations: disparition, désagrégation et parfois recomposition des anciennes aristocraties et constitution de nouvelles aristocraties ? Comment appréhender le phénomène aristocratique dans son extension européenne ? Comment articuler étude des tensions entre appartenances contradictoires - nationale et européenne, nobiliaire et démocratique - dans lesquelles sont parfois enserrés les aristocrates, et analyse des modes de reproduction de ces groupes ? Ce sont quelques-unes des questions majeures abordées dans ce livre

Reproducibility of fluorescent expression from engineered biological constructs in E. coli

We present results of the first large-scale interlaboratory study carried out in synthetic biology, as part of the 2014 and 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions. Participants at 88 institutions around the world measured fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli. Few participants were able to measure absolute fluorescence, so data was analyzed in terms of ratios. Precision was strongly related to fluorescent strength, ranging from 1.54-fold standard deviation for the ratio between strong promoters to 5.75-fold for the ratio between the strongest and weakest promoter, and while host strain did not affect expression ratios, choice of instrument did. This result shows that high quantitative precision and reproducibility of results is possible, while at the same time indicating areas needing improved laboratory practices.Peer reviewe