Making Toilets More Affordable for the Poor Through Microfinance

Over a 13-month period, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) worked with a number of partners, including the international non-profit Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) and International Development Enterprises (iDE), to pilot a sanitation financing program to address the challenge of reaching low-income households with improved sanitation solutions. This learning note presents the lessons from this pilot to promote scale-up in Cambodia and to inform similar efforts in other countries

Robust and Optimal Blood-Glucose Control in Diabetes Using Linear Parameter Varying paradigms

Non

Disconnection clauses: an inevitable symptom of regionalism?

‘Disconnection clauses’ are legal provisions inserted into multilateral conventions to ensure that certain parties to the convention are not required to apply the rules of the convention because other relevant rules have already been agreed to among themselves. A disconnection clause can also be described more generally as a ‘conflict clause’ because it signals to all parties that parallel and potentially conflicting treaty obligations exist. This paper presents a discussion of the disconnection clause which argues that while these clauses make it possible for a limited group of parties to enhance the objectives of a treaty by taking measures that correspond to their special circumstance, this practice also creates a possibility that the inter se agreement will undermine the original treaty regime. The actual impact of a particular disconnection clause depends on how the clause is crafted, along with the changing nature of the regime that it refers to. The potential for a disconnection clause to undermine the object and purpose of the original treaty can therefore be removed during its design. Nevertheless, without full disclosure when negotiating the convention, any clause that seeks to replace treaty provisions with an alternative regime that would be applicable only between certain parties may, at worst, be creating different standards for different parties and, at best, be opaque and incoherent. This paper first describes the various types of disconnection clause, focusing on their purpose and development. It then assesses the main legal and political controversies surrounding these clauses before assessing whether these clauses could potentially create more legal problems than they are intended to solve or whether they are simply a practical response to deepening regionalism

On details of the thermodynamical derivation of the Ginsburg--Landau equations

We examine the procedure of thermodynamical derivation of the Ginsburg--Landau equation for current, which is given unclear and contradictory interpretations in existing textbooks. We clarify all steps of this procedure and find as a consequence a limitation on the validity range of the thermodynamic Ginsburg--Landau theory, which does not seem to be explicitely stated up to now: we conclude that the thermodynamic theory is applicable only to a superconducting specimen that is not a part of an external current-carrying loop.Comment: 11 pages. Accepted for publication in 'Superconductor Science and Technology

Stability of organo-mineral complexes in soils with andic properties as influenced by land use intensification : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Agricultural Science in Soil Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Soils with andic properties are characterised by having abundant reactive Al in the form of short-range-order Al constituents and organo-Al complexes, which facilitate the accumulation of soil organic matter (SOM) through the formation of the so-called organo-mineral complexes. Recent studies on New Zealand pastoral systems, however, have reported the loss of C from soils with andic properties. This has been attributed to management practices such as liming and urine deposition and associated hydrolysis reactions that un-stabilise the associations of SOM with reactive Al. but mechanistic studies to prove this have not been carried out. The objective of this study has been to compare soils under different land uses and management intensification regimes so that the influence of these on the organic and inorganic chemistry and the stability of organo-mineral complexes of soils with andic properties can be inferred. For this, soil samples under a pine stand (Forest) and two paddocks differing in the degree of intensification (Paddock 1 < Paddock 2) were taken. Major soil chemical properties were determined, including pH, total C and N content, reactive inorganic and organic Al fractions, and SOM molecular fingerprinting. Soil pH in Forest (pH-H2O, 5.3) was significantly lower (P<0.05) than that in Paddock 1 (pH-H2O, 5.7), which was itself significantly lower (P<0.05) than pH in Paddock 2 (pH-H2O, 6.1). Soil C and N concentrations were significantly higher in the soils under pasture than under pine (63.8 g C kg–1), and C in Paddock 2 (96.0 g C kg–1) was significantly lower (P < 0.05) than that in Paddock 1 (101.7 g C kg–1). While allophane content was shown to increase (from 5.1 to 7.9 to 10.5 %) with intensification (i.e. Paddock 2 compared with Paddock 1 and Forest), organo-Al complexes, as estimated with sodium pyrophosphate (Alp), were shown to decrease (Forest, 6.6 g kg–1; Paddock 1, 6.8 g kg–1; Paddock 2, 5.7 g kg–1). At the molecular level, SOM under pine had a higher relative contribution of microbially processed organic matter than that under pasture, whereas the latter had a larger contribution of N-containing and aliphatic compounds. We proposed that the increase in pH on intensification weakened the ability of organic ligands to compete with OH- for reactive Al and thus the potential of inorganic short-range-order constituents to chemically protect SOM through the formation of organo-mineral complexes. The study thus provided evidence of how different land uses and management intensification influence soil chemistry and SOM stocks in soils with andic properties as well as SOM molecular composition