Using complex adaptive systems to investigate Aboriginal-tourism relationships in Purnululu National Park: exploring the role of capital

Resource management systems such as national parks are complex and dynamic with strong interdependencies between their human and ecological components. Their management has become more difficult as scale, impacts and consequences have increased and local communities have become increasingly involved. Increasing pressures from tourism have added to this management complexity. Complex adaptive systems thinking, and especially the metaphor of the adaptive cycle (Holling 2001), can potentially enhance our understanding of these resource systems, including national parks. The concept of the adaptive cycle can help understand changes over time in a system such as a national park

The impacts of tourism on two communities adjacent to the Kruger National Park, South Africa

This paper explores the socioeconomic impacts of tourism associated with the Kruger National Park, South Africa's flagship national park, on the neighbouring villages of Cork and Belfast. Case study research, where the study area was characterised as a social-ecological system, was used to investigate the impacts of Park tourism on these communities. The findings offer a micro-scale, local community perspective of these impacts and indicate that the enclave nature of Park tourism keeps local communities separate from the Park and makes it hard for them to benefit from it. The paper concludes with reflections on this perceived separation, and suggests the need to make the Park boundaries more 'permeable' so as to improve relationships with adjacent communities, while also pragmatically managing community expectation

Characterization of a population of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. vasinfectum causing wilt of cotton in Australia

Following the discovery of fusarium wilt in Australian cotton crops in 1993, isolates of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. vasinfectum were collected from 6 cotton farms on the Darling Downs of Queensland. Using a range of procedures the Australian isolates could not be differentiated from each other, but they did differ from foreign isolates of the pathogen in a number of characteristics. Pathogenically, the isolates behaved similarly to race 6 of the pathogen when inoculated onto differential lines. Using aesculin hydrolysis tests, however, it was difficult to match local isolates with any of the known races. Additionally, none of the foreign isolates examined produced detectable volatile compounds when grown on a starch substrate, while all Australian isolates produced a distinctive odour during these tests. The local strain was not vegetatively compatible with any of the foreign isolates and belonged in a single, unique vegetative compatibility group. It is speculated that the Australian strain arose locally, perhaps from a minor population becoming prominent in response to wide-scale planting of highly susceptible cotton cultivars. These findings have significant implications for control of the disease and spread of the pathogen in Australia

Gravitation Physics at BGPL

We report progress on a program of gravitational physics experiments using cryogenic torsion pendula undergoing large-amplitude torsion oscillation. This program includes tests of the gravitational inverse square law and of the weak equivalence principle. Here we describe our ongoing search for inverse-square-law violation at a strength down to $10^{-5}$ of standard gravity. The low-vibration environment provided by the Battelle Gravitation Physics Laboratory (BGPL) is uniquely suited to this study.Comment: To be published in The Proceedings of the Francesco Melchiorri Memorial Conference as a special issue of New Astronomy Review

Mixed States of Composite Fermions Carrying Two and Four Vortices

There now exists preliminary experimental evidence for some fractions, such as $\nu$ = 4/11 and 5/13, that do not belong to any of the sequences $\nu=n/(2pn\pm 1)$, $p$ and $n$ being integers. We propose that these states are mixed states of composite fermions of different flavors, for example, composite fermions carrying two and four vortices. We also obtain an estimate of the lowest-excitation dispersion curve as well as the transport gap; the gaps for 4/11 are smaller than those for 1/3 by approximately a factor of 50.Comment: Accepted for PRB rapid communication (scheduled to appear in Nov 15, 2000 issue

Structures for Interacting Composite Fermions: Stripes, Bubbles, and Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

Much of the present day qualitative phenomenology of the fractional quantum Hall effect can be understood by neglecting the interactions between composite fermions altogether. For example the fractional quantum Hall effect at $\nu=n/(2pn\pm 1)$ corresponds to filled composite-fermion Landau levels,and the compressible state at $\nu=1/2p$ to the Fermi sea of composite fermions. Away from these filling factors, the residual interactions between composite fermions will determine the nature of the ground state. In this article, a model is constructed for the residual interaction between composite fermions, and various possible states are considered in a variational approach. Our study suggests formation of composite-fermion stripes, bubble crystals, as well as fractional quantum Hall states for appropriate situations.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Girvin-MacDonald-Platzman Collective Mode at General Filling Factors: Magneto-Roton Minimum at Half-Filled Landau Level

The single mode approximation has proved useful for the excitation spectrum at $\nu=1/3$. We apply it to general fractions and find that it predicts $n$ magneto-roton minima in the dispersion of the Girvin-MacDonald-Platzman collective mode for the fractional quantum Hall states at $\nu=n/(2n+1)$, and one magneto-roton minimum for both the composite Fermi sea and the paired composite fermion state. Experimental relevance of the results will be considered.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Quantum groups and nonabelian braiding in quantum Hall systems

Wave functions describing quasiholes and electrons in nonabelian quantum Hall states are well known to correspond to conformal blocks of certain coset conformal field theories. In this paper we explicitly analyse the algebraic structure underlying the braiding properties of these conformal blocks. We treat the electrons and the quasihole excitations as localised particles carrying charges related to a quantum group that is determined explicitly for the cases of interest. The quantum group description naturally allows one to analyse the braid group representations carried by the multi-particle wave functions. As an application, we construct the nonabelian braid group representations which govern the exchange of quasiholes in the fractional quantum Hall effect states that have been proposed by N. Read and E. Rezayi, recovering the results of C. Nayak and F. Wilczek for the Pfaffian state as a special case.Comment: 60 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX, uses AMSfont

Censoring for loss to follow-up in time-to-event analyses of composite outcomes or in the presence of competing risks

Background: In time-to-event analyses, there is limited guidance on when persons who are lost to follow-up (LTFU) should be censored. Methods: We simulated bias in risk estimates for: (1) a composite event of measured (outcome only observable in a patient encounter) and captured events (outcome observable outside a patient encounter); and a (2) measured or (3) captured event in the presence of a competing event of the other type, under three censoring strategies: (i) censor at the last study encounter; (ii) censor when LTFU definition is met; and (iii) a new, hybrid censoring strategy. We demonstrate the real-world impact of this decision by estimating: (1) time to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) diagnosis or death, (2) time to initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART), and (3) time to death before ART initiation among adults engaged in HIV care. Results: For (1) our hybrid censoring strategy was least biased. In our example, 5-year risk of AIDS or death was overestimated using last-encounter censoring (25%) and under-estimated using LTFU-definition censoring (21%), compared with results from our hybrid approach (24%). Last-encounter censoring was least biased for (2). When estimating 5-year risk of ART initiation, LTFU-definition censoring underestimated risk (80% vs. 85% using last-encounter censoring). LTFU-definition censoring was least biased for (3). When estimating 5-year risk of death before ART initiation, last-encounter censoring overestimated risk (5.2% vs. 4.7% using LTFU-definition censoring). Conclusions: The least biased censoring strategy for time-to-event analyses in the presence of LTFU depends on the event and estimand of interest