Fencing elephants: The hidden politics of wildlife fencing in Laikipia, Kenya

Conservation is a fundamentally spatial pursuit. Human–elephant conflict (HEC), in particular crop-raiding, is a significant and complex conservation problem wherever elephants and people occupy the same space. Conservationists and wildlife managers build electrified fences as a technical solution to this problem. Fences provide a spatial means of controlling human–elephant interactions by creating a place for elephants and a place for cultivation. They are often planned and designed based on the ecology of the target species. Yet as we show in this case study, behind their technical façade, fences are highly political. This article presents the process of planning and building the 121 km West Laikipia Fence: created to prevent elephants from moving out of large private and government-owned ranches and onto smallholder cultivated land to the west of Laikipia County. We seek to show how the construction of a fence to solve the problem of HEC led to the division, reinforcement and communication of territory on the ground and how this was captured and shaped by different, and sometimes conflicting, political interests.We would like to thank Professor Nigel Leader-Williams and Dr. Max Graham for their advice and support throughout this research. We are grateful to Space for Giants for institutional and logistical support and to Amon Lekea and Sundry Lekticharan for their assistance with interviews. This research was funded by the Royal Geographical Society and the North England Zoological Society. We thank George Aike for producing the figures for this article.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.11.00

Trends in the Use of Office Machines in Selected Areas of Kentucky

A study presented to the Business Education Department at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment or the requirements for the Master in Business Education Degree by La Verne Belcher Adams on March 25, 1974

The Association of Stress With Anxiety and Depression: Evidence From a Community Health Needs Assessment

Background: Mental illness affects approximately 1 in 5 Americans, making mental health an important area of study for public health. Much research has been conducted on two of the most prevalent mental health disorders, anxiety and depression. However, the association of stress with these disorders, especially specific types of stress (e.g., financial, health, relationship), has been under-studied at the local level. This study aimed to gain insight into the relationship between stress, anxiety, and depression in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. Methods: Data collected in the 2015 Athens-Clarke County Community Health Needs Assessment were analyzed using linear regression models to explore the association between stress and anxiety and depression. Results: When the data were aggregated, the presence of stress in a respondent’s household was associated with a 17.8%. Conclusions: The results demonstrated that, in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, stress was significantly and positively associated with both anxiety and depression. Financial, home environment, and neighborhood safety stressors were the strongest predictors of household mental health disorders. These results have implications for public health policy and clinical professionals, including the possibility of tailoring treatment strategies to the types of stress present in a patient’s life. Further research is needed to explore this relationship in other communities

Dynamical Evolution of Young Embedded Clusters: A Parameter Space Survey

This paper investigates the dynamical evolution of embedded stellar clusters from the protocluster stage, through the embedded star-forming phase, and out to ages of 10 Myr -- after the gas has been removed from the cluster. The relevant dynamical properties of young stellar clusters are explored over a wide range of possible star formation environments using N-body simulations. Many realizations of equivalent initial conditions are used to produce robust statistical descriptions of cluster evolution including the cluster bound fraction, radial probability distributions, as well as the distributions of close encounter distances and velocities. These cluster properties are presented as a function of parameters describing the initial configuration of the cluster, including the initial cluster membership N, initial stellar velocities, cluster radii, star formation efficiency, embedding gas dispersal time, and the degree of primordial mass segregation. The results of this parameter space survey, which includes about 25,000 simulations, provide a statistical description of cluster evolution as a function of the initial conditions. We also present a compilation of the FUV radiation fields provided by these same cluster environments. The output distributions from this study can be combined with other calculations, such as disk photoevaporation models and planetary scattering cross sections, to ascertain the effects of the cluster environment on the processes involved in planet formation.Comment: 65 pages including 20 figures, accepted to ApJ Supplemen

Microlensing planets in M22: free-floating or bound?

We use detailed numerical simulations and theoretical estimates to show that, if confirmed, the unusually brief microlensing events observed by Sahu et al. (2001) in the field of the globular cluster M22 might be explained as a result of microlensing by a population of clustered MACHOs, a dark cluster or RAMBO, not associated with the globular cluster. If real, this dark cluster would be located between M22 and the Galactic bulge and could include at least $10^6$ substellar members with a typical size of 1-3 pc. Bound planets in wide or/and eccentric orbits are also able to reproduce the observed microlensing behaviour, but only if multiplanet systems (including large Kuiper-belt-like objects) are abundant, although, our calculations argue against the latter scenario as the ionization rate in M22 is very high. Dynamically ejected or lone planets are, in principle, incompatible with the observational findings as they either escape their parent cluster in a relatively short time-scale after ejection or segregate toward the outskirts of the cluster. We discuss additional implications of the dark cluster scenario, including the existence of a population of RAMBOs toward the Galactic bulge.Comment: 6 pages, 1 Postscript figure, LaTeX, uses A&A macros, submitted to A&A Main Journa

Mass Drug Administration and beyond: how can we strengthen health systems to deliver complex interventions to eliminate neglected tropical diseases?

Achieving the 2020 goals for Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) requires scale-up of Mass Drug Administration (MDA) which will require long-term commitment of national and global financing partners, strengthening national capacity and, at the community level, systems to monitor and evaluate activities and impact. For some settings and diseases, MDA is not appropriate and alternative interventions are required. Operational research is necessary to identify how existing MDA networks can deliver this more complex range of interventions equitably. The final stages of the different global programmes to eliminate NTDs require eliminating foci of transmission which are likely to persist in complex and remote rural settings. Operational research is required to identify how current tools and practices might be adapted to locate and eliminate these hard-to-reach foci. Chronic disabilities caused by NTDs will persist after transmission of pathogens ceases. Development and delivery of sustainable services to reduce the NTD-related disability is an urgent public health priority. LSTM and its partners are world leaders in developing and delivering interventions to control vector-borne NTDs and malaria, particularly in hard-to-reach settings in Africa. Our experience, partnerships and research capacity allows us to serve as a hub for developing, supporting, monitoring and evaluating global programmes to eliminate NTDs

Configuration space connectivity across the fragile to strong transition in silica

We present a numerical analysis for SiO_2 of the fraction of diffusive direction f_diff for temperatures T on both sides of the fragile-to-strong crossover. The T-dependence of f_diff clearly reveals this change in dynamical behavior. We find that for T above the crossover (fragile region) the system is always close to ridges of the potential energy surface (PES), while below the crossover (strong region), the system mostly explores the PES local minima. Despite this difference, the power law dependence of f_diff on the diffusion constant, as well as the power law dependence of f_diff on the configurational entropy, shows no change at the fragile to strong crossover

Five guidelines to improve context-aware process selection: an Australian banking perspective

As the first phase in the Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle, process identification addresses the problem of identifying which processes to prioritize for improvement. Process selection plays a critical role in this phase, but it is a step with known pitfalls. Decision makers rely frequently on subjective criteria, and their knowledge of the alternative processes put forward for selection is often inconsistent. This leads to poor quality decision-making and wastes resources. In recent years, a rejection of a one-size-fits-all approach to BPM in favor of a more context-aware approach has gained significant academic attention. In this study, the role of context in the process selection step is considered. The context is qualitative, subjective, sensitive to decision-making bias and politically charged. We applied a design-science approach and engaged industry decision makers through a combination of research methods to assess how different configurations of process inputs influence and ultimately improve the quality of the process selection step. The study highlights the impact of framing effects on context and provides five guidelines to improve effectiveness.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Do yoga and meditation moderate the relationship between negative life events and depressive symptoms? Analysis of a national cross-sectional survey of Australian women.

OBJECTIVES: This study aims to examine the role of yoga/meditation in the relationship between negative life events, stress and depression. METHODS: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH) surveyed 7,186 women aged 36-43 years (mean age 39.2 years; 57.2% university degree) in 2015. Mediation and moderation analyses were conducted to examine whether yoga/meditation practice moderated those relationships. RESULTS: Yoga/meditation was practiced by 27.5% of participants, 33.2% reported negative life events in the past 12 months, and 24% had clinical depression. Perceived stress partially mediated the association between negative life events and depressive symptoms (B = 6.28; 95%CI 5.65; 6.92). Social support (B = -0.38; 95%CI -0.54; -0.23) and optimism (B = -0.25;95%CI -0.31; -0.18) moderated the association between stress and depressive symptoms. Yoga/meditation practice moderated the direct association between negative life events and depressive symptoms (B = -0.92; 95%CI -1.67; -0.18). CONCLUSION: Yoga/meditation use was a significant moderator of the relationship between negative life events and depression. Yoga/mediation use did not act via reducing perceived stress, but instead was found to dampen the influence of negative life events on depression directly. More research on how yoga has an impact on depression is warranted