Mimicry - Sheep in wolves' clothing

No abstract available

"I tuik ane quair" - Henryson as auctor

No abstract available

Simulating farm income under the current soil management regime in the mid-hills of Nepal

Farmers in the mid-hills of Nepal follow diverse farming systems. The peri-urban area of this region, where population density is higher, faces several problems in farming. While hills suffer from erosion because they are erodible, the peri-urban areas face the problem of decline in factor productivity, particularly in intensively cultivated farmlands. The present study is concerned with simulating farm income on a regional scale based on soil management practices. Spatial explicit simulation shows that the loss of farm income due to degradation is substantially higher in hills while it is lower in valley bottoms. Strategy formulation and testing in the spatial environment indicates that Geographic Information System is an appropriate methodological tool for simulating the consequences of particular interventions

Farming Differentiation in the Rural-urban Interface of the Middle Mountains, Nepal: Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)Modeling

This article investigates the dominant factors of farming differentiation in the rural-urban interface of the densely populated Kathmandu Valley, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) modeling. The rural-urban interface in the Kathmandu Valley is an important vegetable production pocket which supplies a large amount of the vegetables in the city core. While subsistence farming in the rural area is characterized by a system which integrates livestock and forestry with agriculture, the intensification in the urban fringe is characterized by triple crop rotations and market-oriented intensive vegetable production. Seven factors which were supposed to cause farming variation in the interface were incorporated in the AHP framework and then subjected to the farmers’ judgment in distinctly delineated three farming zones. These factors played crucial yet differing roles in different farming zones. Inaccessibility and use of local resources; higher yield and accessibility and agro-ecological consideration and quality production are the key impacting factors of subsistence, commercial inorganic and smallholder organic farming respectively. The quantification of such factors of farming differentiation through AHP is an important piece of information that will contribute in modeling farming in the rural-urban interface of developing countries which are characterized by a high diversity of farming practices and are undergoing a rapid change in the land use pattern

Eddies in the southern Mozambique Channel

The Agulhas Current system contains one of the world's strongest western boundary currents, and plays an important part in the warm water path of the global thermohaline circulation. However, there have been few surveys of the source regions of the Agulhas Current, and thus little in situ measurement of their variability. Utilizing the more than 5-year record of SeaWiFS data, we examine the eddy activity present in the southern portion of the Mozambique Channel. The two sources of Agulhas input from the central Indian Ocean (southward flow through the Mozambique Channel and westward flow around the southern limit of Madagascar) both show great temporal variability, with no clear seasonal signal. A number of large (-200 km diameter) anticyclonic rings intermittently propagate poleward along the western edge of the channel, sweeping coastal waters into mid channel. Their passage past Maputo appears to affect the circulation of the lee eddy in the Delagoa Bight. The eastern side of the channel is mainly characterized by cyclonic eddies. These are made manifest in the lee of the southern tip of Madagascar, although it is not clear whether many form there or just develop a visible presence due to entrainment of high chlorophyll coastal waters. Several of these cyclonic eddies then appear to move in west-southwesterly direction. The chlorophyll data do reveal the East Madagascar retroflection on occasions, but do not show clear examples of the pinching off of anticyclonic eddies. However surface waters from the East Madagascar Current may reach the African mainland on occasions when no retroflection is present

SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS OF FARMING PRACTICES IN THE PERI-URBAN HINTERLANDS OF NEPAL

Spatial location of the farm households shapes farming practices and livelihoods of the farmers. Many socio-economic variables have strong spatial relations that would otherwise be missed by data aggregation at household level. Geographic Information System (GIS)provides display and analysis of socio-economic data that may be fundamental for many social scientists to understand socio-economic reality influenced by geographical position of the farm households. Present article aims at integrating socio-economic data into GIS environment to examine spatial relation in the resource availability and use employing spatial and random sampling techniques. Result demonstrates the variation in the socioeconomic attributes along the spatial gradient which is mainly related to the infrastructures such as road, market and improved agro-inputs. While households with better access to these infrastructures have tendency to use more agro-chemicals, have larger family, land holding and livestock units, better off-farm opportunities, commercial farming orientation and hence higher family income; opposite is true for the households with poor access to these infrastructures. Peri-urban farmlands, wherever agro-chemicals are applied imprudently, faces the problems of agro-ecological degradation while rural subsistence farming faces the problem of spatial poverty

Forgetful maps between Deligne-Mostow ball quotients

We study forgetful maps between Deligne-Mostow moduli spaces of weighted points on P^1, and classify the forgetful maps that extend to a map of orbifolds between the stable completions. The cases where this happens include the Livn\'e fibrations and the Mostow/Toledo maps between complex hyperbolic surfaces. They also include a retraction of a 3-dimensional ball quotient onto one of its 1-dimensional totally geodesic complex submanifolds

Does practice shape the brain?

No abstract available