Constraints facing goat-keepers and ways of addressing them through a participatory approach: Some experiences from semi-arid India

BAIF Development Research Foundation (BAIF), India, and the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) of the University of Greenwich, UK, are jointly implementing two complementary projects aimed at alleviating goat production problems caused by seasonal feed shortages in semi-arid India. One is entirely field-based and the other is primarily oriented towards laboratory feed evaluation: both started on 1 October 1997 and are due to end on 30 September 2000. The UK.'s Department for International Development is supporting the projects through its Livestock Production Programme. The title of the field-based project, the subject of this report, is: "Easing seasonal feed scarcity for small ruminants in semi-arid crop/livestock systems through a process of participatory research". The project is a multi-disciplinary one: the Project Leader for NRI is a socio-economist, whereas the Project Leader for BAIF is a veterinarian; and contributions are made by other staff from both organisations, who are from a variety of disciplines, including ruminant nutrition and agronomy. Until now the project has been working in three districts of north-west India - two in south Rajasthan (Bhilwara and Udaipur) and one in Gujarat (Bhavnagar). These districts were selected so that different goat production systems would be covered by the project (see Table 1). Limited diagnostic and needs assessment work has also been done in Vidisha district of Madhya Pradesh. During 2000 similar work will be done in two new districts - Dharwad (Kamataka) and Pune (Maharashtra); and if feed scarcity is an important constraint in those districts further trials may be undertaken there

Rare parasitic copepods (Siphonostomatoida: Lernanthropidae) from Egyptian Red Sea fishes

© The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The attached file is the published version of the article

A bibliography of parasites and diseases of marine and freshwater fishes of India

With the increasing demand for fish as human food, aquaculture both in freshwater and salt water is rapidly developing over the world. In the developing countries, fishes are being raised as food. In many countries fish farming is a very important economic activity. The most recent branch, mariculture, has shown advances in raising fishes in brackish, estuarine and bay waters, in which marine, anadromous and catadromous fishes have successfully been grown and maintained

Photophysics of some styryl thiazolo quinoxaline dyes in organic media

The photophysics of a new class of styryl dyes, 2-styryl thiazolo quinoxaline (STQ) based structures was investigated in organic solvents and organized molecular assemblies. The absorption, steady state and time-resolved fluorescence characteristics of the STQ dyes in low-viscosity organic solvents are consistent with a single species in the ground and excited state. The one electron electrochemical oxidation and reduction potentials of the dyes are within ±1V vs. NHE. The spectral shifts of the dyes in organic solvents are linearly correlated with the variation of solvent polarity parameters. The dipole moments in the ground and excited state of the dyes were calculated without assuming a value for the cavity radius. The temperature dependence of the nonradiative rate of STQ dye in DMSO indicated an activation barrier (ΔE=10.7 kJ/mol) which is comparable to the activation energy (Ea=13.7 kJ/mol) of viscous friction in DMSO. In dichloromethane, the activation barrier is 34.0 kJ/mol which is very high compared to Ea=6.64 kJ/mol. Formation of a dye–solvent complex is suggested in dichloromethane. The fluorescence decay of STQ dye is multiexponential in a viscous solvent (2-octanol) or when bound to a protein (Lysozyme), micelle or lipid membrane. In 2-octanol, the decay parameters are wavelength dependent and the results are consistent with the mechanism of excited state kinetics of solvent relaxation. In other systems, the multiexponential decay is due to multiple sites of solubilization of the dye in the organized molecular assembly

Can We Picture Equity? Critically Examining Cross-Cultural Short-Term Project Collaborations

This paper explores equity challenges common to short-term cross-cultural research partnerships. We focus on a project-based activity in which U.S. undergraduate students and college faculty taught middle-school students in Goa, India how to make podcasts about complex environmental problems. Project team members conducted a collaborative auto-ethnography focused on questions of power, leadership, collaboration, and equity, and examined exit-interview photo elicitation data to identify the core challenges of ethical and equitable short-term cross-cultural research and programming. Our use of photographs as conversation prompts helped to highlight contradictions and asymmetries along axes of power, cultural imperialism, knower-knowledge, age, race/ethnicity, social class, and gender. We reflect on possibilities for educational research that rejects a “voluntourism” model and moves, if imperfectly, toward more equitable international collaborations

A performance comparison of zone-based multicast protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

With the current trend toward ubiquitous computing come wireless devices capable of forming the nodes of mobile ad hoc networks. Such networks typically rely on routing protocols in order to communicate messages from a source node to a destination node through a set of intermediary nodes. In a typical ad hoc environment, mobile nodes mostly work as a group and are involved in collaborative computing. Multicast communication is more effective in these scenarios. This paper presents the comparison of the performance of two zone-based multicast routing protocols. Shared-tree MZR is a shared tree variant of the Multicast Routing Protocol based on Zone Routing (MZR). We compare the two variants and analyze their performance under various network conditions. The test results show that Shared-tree MZR protocol performs well and has significantly low overhead in scenarios with multiple sources. ©2003 IEEE

A zone-based shared-tree multicast protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

This paper proposes a new multicast protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The proposed protocol, Shared-Tree MZR, is a shared tree variant of the Multicast Routing Protocol based on Zone Routing (MZR). The concept of zone-based multicast routing for mobile ad hoc networks was originally proposed in MZR. The new protocol utilizes the advantages of the shared-tree together with the advantages of the zone-based routing. The performance of the protocol is analyzed for various network conditions. The test results show that the new protocol performs well and has significantly low overhead in scenarios with multiple sources

N-Aryl-linked spirocyclic polymers for membrane separations of complex hydrocarbon mixtures

The fractionation of crude-oil mixtures through distillation is a large-scale, energy-intensive process. Membrane materials can avoid phase changes in such mixtures and thereby reduce the energy intensity of these thermal separations. With this application in mind, we created spirocyclic polymers with N-aryl bonds that demonstrated noninterconnected microporosity in the absence of ladder linkages. The resulting glassy polymer membranes demonstrated nonthermal membrane fractionation of light crude oil through a combination of class- and size-based “sorting” of molecules. We observed an enrichment of molecules lighter than 170 daltons corresponding to a carbon number of 12 or a boiling point less than 200°C in the permeate. Such scalable, selective membranes offer potential for the hybridization of energy-efficient technology with conventional processes such as distillation