Summary of Baseline Household Survey Results: Vaishali Site, Bihar State (Northeast India)

This report summarizes the results of a household survey of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) carried out in the Vaishali sampling frame of Bihar, northeast India, with an objective to better understand the baseline characteristics of farm families, changes in farming practices over the last 10 years, household livelihood sources, and household food security and asset profiles, among others

Understanding Adaptive Capacity: Sustainable Livelihoods and Food Security in Coastal Bangladesh

This paper analyses data from a household-level survey of 980 agricultural and fishing households in seven sites across southern Bangladesh. We examine the relationship between assets, livelihood strategies, food security and farming practice changes. These households are coping with huge demographic, economic, and environmental changes. The results suggest that the least food secure households are also the least adaptive, and are making few, if any changes, in their agricultural practices. They have relatively few assets, and are producing and selling fewer types of agricultural products than more food secure households. The importance of diversification as a strategy to deal with change is evident - households making more farming practice changes are more diversified in terms of the number of different agricultural outputs produced and sold. Market-related factors are more frequently given as reasons for changes in practices than climate-related factors. We also see a strong relationship between education and adaptability. Households with more educated members are likelier to be introducing new agricultural practices. The often unrecognized, but important role that women play in agricultural production and livelihood strategies in Bangladesh is also evident. This rich dataset (freely available at: www.ccafs.cgiar.org/resources/baseline-surveys) provides insights into the relationship between household food security and the agricultural livelihood changes being made by rural households in southern Bangladesh. The analysis provides relatively rare empirical evidence supporting the use of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) as a conceptual approach for understanding household food security as well as adaptation of agriculture to climate change. This information is critical and timely for ongoing dialogues on appropriate ‘climate-resilient’ strategies and policies for increasing the adaptive capacity of households under climate change, and enhancing food security at both household and national levels

You Can't Get Through Szekeres Wormholes - or - Regularity, Topology and Causality in Quasi-Spherical Szekeres Models

The spherically symmetric dust model of Lemaitre-Tolman can describe wormholes, but the causal communication between the two asymptotic regions through the neck is even less than in the vacuum (Schwarzschild-Kruskal-Szekeres) case. We investigate the anisotropic generalisation of the wormhole topology in the Szekeres model. The function E(r, p, q) describes the deviation from spherical symmetry if \partial_r E \neq 0, but this requires the mass to be increasing with radius, \partial_r M > 0, i.e. non-zero density. We investigate the geometrical relations between the mass dipole and the locii of apparent horizon and of shell-crossings. We present the various conditions that ensure physically reasonable quasi-spherical models, including a regular origin, regular maxima and minima in the spatial sections, and the absence of shell-crossings. We show that physically reasonable values of \partial_r E \neq 0 cannot compensate for the effects of \partial_r M > 0 in any direction, so that communication through the neck is still worse than the vacuum. We also show that a handle topology cannot be created by identifying hypersufaces in the two asymptotic regions on either side of a wormhole, unless a surface layer is allowed at the junction. This impossibility includes the Schwarzschild-Kruskal-Szekeres case.Comment: zip file with LaTeX text + 6 figures (.eps & .ps). 47 pages. Second replacement corrects some minor errors and typos. (First replacement prints better on US letter size paper.

Sleep assessment by patients and nurses in the intensive care: An exploratory descriptive study

© 2016. Background: Sleep disruption is common in intensive care unit (ICU) patients, with reports indicating reduced quality and quantity of sleep in many patients. There is growing evidence that sleep in this setting may be improved. Aim: To describe ICU patients' self-report assessment of sleep, examine the relationship between patients' self-reported sleep and their reported sleep by the bedside nurse, and describe the strategies suggested by patients to promote sleep. Methods: An exploratory descriptive study was undertaken with communicative adult patients consecutively recruited in 2014-2015. Patients reported sleep using the Richards-Campbell Sleep Questionnaire (score range 0-100. mm; higher score indicates better sleep quality), with nursing assessment of sleep documented across a five level ordinal variable. Patients were asked daily to describe strategies that helped or hindered their sleep. Ethical approval for the study was gained. Descriptive statistical analysis was performed [median (interquartile range)]; relationships were tested using Spearman's rank correlation and differences assessed using the Kruskal-Wallis test; . p . <. 0.05 was considered significant. Results: Participants (n = 151) were recruited [age: 60 (46-71) years; ICU length of stay 4 (2-9) days] with 356 self-reports of sleep. Median perceived sleep quality was 46 (26-65) mm. A moderate relationship existed between patients' self-assessment and nurses' assessment of sleep (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient 0.39-0.50; . p . <. 0.001). Strategies identified by patients to improve sleep included adequate pain relief and sedative medication, a peaceful and comfortable environment and physical interventions, e.g. clustering care, ear plugs. Conclusion: Patients reported on their sleep a median of 2 (1-3) days during their ICU stay, suggesting that routine use of self-report was feasible. These reports revealed low sleep quality. Patients reported multiple facilitators and barriers for sleep, with environmental and patient comfort factors being most common. Interventions that target these factors to improve patient sleep should be implemented

Direct observation of nanometer-scale orbital angular momentum accumulation

Conversion of charge to orbital angular momentum through the orbital Hall effect (OHE) holds transformative potential for the development of orbital-based electronics, however, it is challenging to directly observe the electrically generated orbital accumulation. Here, we detect the OHE by directly quantifying the orbital accumulation along the edges of a titanium thin film using a scanning transmission electron microscope. We measure the Ti L-edge using electron energy-loss spectroscopy with nanometer resolution and find a sizable orbital accumulation at the sample's outer perimeters, consistent with all signatures expected for the OHE, and determine an orbital diffusion length $\ell_o \approx 7.3$ nm. Our data points to a surprising dependence of the orbital diffusion length on the nano-structural morphology.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

CCAFS Site Portfolio: Core Sites in the CCAFS Regions: East Africa, West Africa and South Asia

The CGIAR Research Program Climate Change, Agriculture, Food Security (CCAFS) is a 10-year research initiative launched by CGIAR and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). CCAFS seeks to overcome the threats to agriculture and food security in a changing climate, exploring new ways of helping vulnerable rural communities adjust to global changes in climate. CCAFS brings together the world’s best researchers in agricultural science, development research, climate science, and Earth System science to identify and address the most important interactions, synergies and trade- offs between climate change, agriculture and food security. CCAFS also involves farmers, policy makers, donors, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders to integrate their knowledge and needs into the tools and approaches that are being developed. The overall goal of CCAFS is to overcome the additional threats posed by a changing climate to achieving food security, enhancing livelihoods and improving environmental management. In 2010/2011, CCAFS initially focused on three regions: East Africa (EA), West Africa (WA) and South Asia (SA). Two additional target regions (Southeast Asia and Latin America) were added in late 2012. This report outlines the site selection process of current and future sites and provides a brief overview of the initially selected CCAFS sites

Gender, climate change, agriculture, and food security: a CCAFS training-of-trainers (TOT) manual to prepare South Asian rural women to adapt to climate change

This training-of-trainers manual is designed to train you to be able to deliver a capacity enhancement workshop (CEW) to rural women on climate change and gender. It has been designed by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and is appropriate to the South Asian context

Instability of black hole formation under small pressure perturbations

We investigate here the spectrum of gravitational collapse endstates when arbitrarily small perfect fluid pressures are introduced in the classic black hole formation scenario as described by Oppenheimer, Snyder and Datt (OSD) [1]. This extends a previous result on tangential pressures [2] to the more physically realistic scenario of perfect fluid collapse. The existence of classes of pressure perturbations is shown explicitly, which has the property that injecting any smallest pressure changes the final fate of the dynamical collapse from a black hole to a naked singularity. It is therefore seen that any smallest neighborhood of the OSD model, in the space of initial data, contains collapse evolutions that go to a naked singularity outcome. This gives an intriguing insight on the nature of naked singularity formation in gravitational collapse.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, several modifications to match published version on GR