Strengthening the role of civil society in water sector governance towards climate change adaptation in African cities – Durban, Maputo, Nairobi

Water resources management is one of the most important climate change-related issues on international, national and urban public policy agendas. Income inequality in South Africa, Mozambique, and Kenya is among the largest in the world; in all three countries, equity struggles related to water are growing in social, political and ecological significance, which is both a symptom and a cause of urban vulnerabilities related to climate change. Democratic mediation of these conflicts, and sustainable long-term management of water resources in the face of climate change, requires public participation. But those most affected by water issues such as scarcity and flooding are also those least likely to be able to participate in governance and policy institutions. In particular, members of economically disadvantaged groups – especially women, in general – tend to be gravely impacted by poor water management, but also face great difficulties in participating effectively in governance bodies. This project responded to that particular need, and has developed practical strategies for strengthening urban governments in planning investments in climate change adaptation. The project linked university researchers with community-based NGOs conducting environmental education and organizing participatory workshops in low-income urban areas with pressing climate change and water-related problems; built on proven methods of community-university collaboration to strengthen urban watershed governance; increased equity in public participation processes related to urban climate change adaptation; and fostered progressive local, national and international policy development on climate change-related water management – while training students, university researchers, NGO staff members, and community participants. The major research outcome of the project is its contribution to understanding effective ways of strengthening local governments, NGOs and civil society organizations involved in environmental education and organizing for improved public participation in watershed governance and climate change adaptation in African urban areas.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Superinflation, quintessence, and the avoidance of the initial singularity

We consider the dynamics of a spatially flat universe dominated by a self-interacting nonminimally coupled scalar field. The structure of the phase space and complete phase portraits for the conformal coupling case are given. It is shown that the non-minimal coupling modifies drastically the dynamics of the universe. New cosmological behaviors are identified, including superinflation ($\dot{H}>0$), avoidance of big bang singularities through classical birth of the universe from empty Minkowski space, and spontaneous entry into and exit from inflation. The relevance of this model to the description of quintessence is discussed.Comment: RevTex, 10 pages, 4 figures, To appear in the proceedings of the 5th Peyresq meetin

Stability properties and asymptotics for N non-minimally coupled scalar fields cosmology

We consider here the dynamics of some homogeneous and isotropic cosmological models with $N$ interacting classical scalar fields non-minimally coupled to the spacetime curvature, as an attempt to generalize some recent results obtained for one and two scalar fields. We show that a Lyapunov function can be constructed under certain conditions for a large class of models, suggesting that chaotic behavior is ruled out for them. Typical solutions tend generically to the empty de Sitter (or Minkowski) fixed points, and the previous asymptotic results obtained for the one field model remain valid. In particular, we confirm that, for large times and a vanishing cosmological constant, even in the presence of the extra scalar fields, the universe tends to an infinite diluted matter dominated era.Comment: 10 page

Stability of Biaxial Nematic Phase for Systems with Variable Molecular Shape Anisotropy

We study the influence of fluctuations in molecular shape on the stability of the biaxial nematic phase by generalizing the mean field model of Mulder and Ruijgrok [Physica A {\bf 113}, 145 (1982)]. We limit ourselves to the case when the molecular shape anisotropy, represented by the alignment tensor, is a random variable of an annealed type. A prototype of such behavior can be found in lyotropic systems - a mixture of potassium laurate, 1-decanol, and $D_2O$, where distribution of the micellar shape adjusts to actual equilibrium conditions. Further examples of materials with the biaxial nematic phase, where molecular shape is subject to fluctuations, are thermotropic materials composed of flexible trimeric- or tetrapod-like molecular units. Our calculations show that the Gaussian equilibrium distribution of the variables describing molecular shape (dispersion force) anisotropy gives rise to new classes of the phase diagrams, absent in the original model. Depending on properties of the shape fluctuations, the stability of the biaxial nematic phase can be either enhanced or depressed, relative to the uniaxial nematic phases. In the former case the splitting of the Landau point into two triple points with a direct phase transition line from isotropic to biaxial phase is observed.Comment: 18 pages containing 6 figure

Difficulties for the entrepreneurial small-scale comercial poultry production in developing countries.

Projeto/Plano de Ação: 02.09.70700-01

Going Further with Point Pair Features

Point Pair Features is a widely used method to detect 3D objects in point clouds, however they are prone to fail in presence of sensor noise and background clutter. We introduce novel sampling and voting schemes that significantly reduces the influence of clutter and sensor noise. Our experiments show that with our improvements, PPFs become competitive against state-of-the-art methods as it outperforms them on several objects from challenging benchmarks, at a low computational cost.Comment: Corrected post-print of manuscript accepted to the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2016; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-46487-9_5