Madagascar's future climate change intensified actions and policy reforms: fostering local initiatives or business as usual?

As Madagascar, like all other countries on the globe, is gearing up for the meeting of the 21 st Conference  of Parties (COP21 ) of UN’s Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), we reflect on the persistent failure of development policies in Madagascar, and suggest that there may be fundamental  flaws in perceptions about development interventions and transferability of solutions, resulting in a country in permanent crisis despite the island’s great potential. The major official donors claim that they had left the island to itself since the 2009 crisis. However, World Bank statistics show that, in current terms, Madagascar was receiving US$400 million in 1990 and US$ 500 million in 2013. In the same interval, the Gross National Product (GDP) per capita remained basically the same (equivalent to 440  US$/capita in 2013). Should COP21 produce a momentum for massive investment in carbon emission reduction and in adaptation to climate change (CC), we propose that, at a minimum, these new projects, plans, programs and policies should aim for sustainability by applying Environmental and Social Assessments at all required levels and that, preferably, this should be the opportunity to approach  development differently. In particular, we advocate focusing on enhancing the generative capacity (i.e., the capacity to generate unplanned-for new development options) of Malagasy people to better take  advantage of the natural resources and the information and communications technologies (ICT) infrastructure already in place. Such an ambitious program is not without risks and pitfalls, but it is one way of thinking about breaking out of Madagascar’s current self-reinforcing cycle of under-performance. The purpose of this essay is to question the status quo to stimulate discussion and new thinking, short of which observers, 20 years from now, will find themselves echoing the same frustrations that observers and inhabitants alike experience when faced with the present state of development in Madagascar.Au moment où Madagascar, comme tous les pays de cette planète, se prépare à participer à la 21 e  Conférence des Parties (COP21 ) de la Convention Cadre des Nations Unies sur les Changements Climatiques (CCNUCC), nous considérons les échecs récurrents des politiques de développement à  Madagascar pour souligner de possibles biais fondamentaux dans les perceptions des interventions de développement et la transférabilité de solutions, avec, comme résultat, une crise permanente malgré le grand potentiel de l’île. Alors que la plupart des bailleurs de fonds officiels font état d’une cessation de leurs activités dans le pays depuis la crise de 2009, les statistiques de la Banque Mondiale montrent que, en termes courants, Madagascar recevait US$400 millions en 1990 et US$500 millions en 2013. Au cours de la même période, le Produit intérieur brut par habitant a stagné (équivalent à 440 US$/capita en 2014). À supposer que la COP21 ait pour résultat des investissements massifs dans la réduction des émissions de carbone et dans l’adaptation au changement climatique, nous  proposons que, a minima, ces  nouveaux projets, plans, programmes et politiques devraient viser à plus de durabilité en appliquant les Évaluations  environnementales et sociales à tous les niveaux requis et que, de préférence, cet afflux de capitaux représente l’opportunité d’une nouvelle approche du développement. En particulier, nous proposons une focalisation sur la capacité générative (définie somme la capacité à générer spontanément de nouvelles options de développement) des citoyens malgaches de mieux tirer parti des ressources naturelles et de l’infrastructure des technologies de l’information et des communications (TIC) déjà en place. L’ambition d’un tel programme n’est ni sans risques ni sans embûches, mais nous estimons qu’il s’agit d’un moyen de sortir du cycle actuel et auto-entretenu de sousperformance qui existe à Madagascar. Cet essai propose ainsi de mettre en cause le statut quo afin de stimuler la discussion et une nouvelle approche. À défaut et sans changement, les habitants comme les observateurs connaitront, dans 20 ans, les  frustrations d’aujourd’hui, face à l’état du développement de Madagascar

Scale, Scope, and Specialization Effects on Retailers’ Procurement Strategies: Evidence from the Fresh Produce Markets of São Paulo

Worldwide, the emergence of large supermarket chains in food retail markets is often associated with the marginalization of smaller retailers. A notable exception exists in Brazil, however, where small retailers have held their place in the market and recently even gained ground. The literature investigating how retail concentration has affected agrifood chains has focused activities of the largest retail chains, implicitly holding the scale, scope and specialization of retailers’ input needs constant, and overlooking the influence of these factors on retailers’ procurement strategies. This paper tests hypotheses regarding these variables’ effects on retailers’ fresh produce procurement strategies. Data is drawn from a survey of retailers in metropolitan São Paulo. The research results provide insight into factors underlying retailers’ procurement strategy choices and tradeoffs among options. The results support the fundamental hypothesis of the paper that research on the competitive strategies of smaller retailers in a context of market domination by large retailers should not focus exclusively on the degree to which the smaller retailers imitate the larger retailers rather it should account for the possibility that the underlying characteristics of the retailers may make diverse competitive strategies appropriate.scale, scope, specialization, procurement strategy, fresh produce, retail, Political Economy, L22,

Diffraction of a Bose-Einstein Condensate in the Time Domain

We have observed the diffraction of a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms on a vibrating mirror potential. The matter wave packet bounces back at normal incidence on a blue-detuned evanescent light field after a 3.6 mm free fall. The mirror vibrates at a frequency of 500 kHz with an amplitude of 3.0 nm. The atomic carrier and sidebands are directly imaged during their ballistic expansion. The locations and the relative weights of the diffracted atomic wave packets are in very good agreement with the theoretical prediction of Carsten Henkel et al. [1].Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev.

Fill in Fabrics: Body-Aware Self-Supervised Inpainting for Image-Based Virtual Try-On

Previous virtual try-on methods usually focus on aligning a clothing item with a person, limiting their ability to exploit the complex pose, shape and skin color of the person, as well as the overall structure of the clothing, which is vital to photo-realistic virtual try-on. To address this potential weakness, we propose a fill in fabrics (FIFA) model, a self-supervised conditional generative adversarial network based framework comprised of a Fabricator and a unified virtual try-on pipeline with a Segmenter, Warper and Fuser. The Fabricator aims to reconstruct the clothing image when provided with a masked clothing as input, and learns the overall structure of the clothing by filling in fabrics. A virtual try-on pipeline is then trained by transferring the learned representations from the Fabricator to Warper in an effort to warp and refine the target clothing. We also propose to use a multi-scale structural constraint to enforce global context at multiple scales while warping the target clothing to better fit the pose and shape of the person. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FIFA model achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard VITON dataset for virtual try-on of clothing items, and is shown to be effective at handling complex poses and retaining the texture and embroidery of the clothing

Diffraction limited optics for single atom manipulation

We present an optical system designed to capture and observe a single neutral atom in an optical dipole trap, created by focussing a laser beam using a large numerical aperture N.A.=0.5 aspheric lens. We experimentally evaluate the performance of the optical system and show that it is diffraction limited over a broad spectral range (~ 200 nm) with a large transverse field (+/- 25 microns). The optical tweezer created at the focal point of the lens is able to trap single atoms of 87Rb and to detect them individually with a large collection efficiency. We measure the oscillation frequency of the atom in the dipole trap, and use this value as an independent determination of the waist of the optical tweezer. Finally, we produce with the same lens two dipole traps separated by 2.2 microns and show that the imaging system can resolve the two atoms.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures; typos corrected and references adde

Diffuse reflection of a Bose-Einstein condensate from a rough evanescent wave mirror

We present experimental results showing the diffuse reflection of a Bose-Einstein condensate from a rough mirror, consisting of a dielectric substrate supporting a blue-detuned evanescent wave. The scattering is anisotropic, more pronounced in the direction of the surface propagation of the evanescent wave. These results agree very well with theoretical predictions.Comment: submitted to J Phys B, 10 pages, 6 figure

Localisation des tanins dans la pellicule de baie de raisin

La localisation des taoins dans Ja pellicule de raisin a été étudiée en combinant les resultats obtenus par deux méthodes: observation microscopique (photonique et électronique à  transmission), et analyse chimique de différentes fractions obtenues après isolement des cellules pelliculaires sous forme de protoplastes. Trois grands groupes de tanins ont ainsi été déterminées selon leur localisation: tanins libres dans le suc vacuolaire, visualisés sous forme de granules qui augmentent de taille au fur et à mesure que l'on se rapproche de la surface de la pellicule; des tanins liés ont été mis en évidence dans deux autres localisations: tanins liés aux polysaccharides des parois cellulaires par des liaisons osidiques et tanins liés avec les protéines constitutives de la face interne des membranes vacuolaires.Localization of tannins in grape berry skinsThe localization of tannins in grape berry skins has been studied by associating results obtained with two methods: light and transmission electron microscopy, and chemical analysis of the fractions obtained after isolation of cells as protoplasts. According to their location, three groups of tannins were determined. The first consists of free tannins in solution in the vacuolar sap (these tannins appear in the form of granules decreasing in size from the skin surface to the pulp). Two other groups are constituted by bound tannins: those bound to the proteins of the internal face of the tonoplast, and those bound to the cell wall polysaccharides by osidic bonds

Lattice instabilities of cubic NiTi from first principles

The phonon dispersion relation of NiTi in the simple cubic B2 structure is computed using first-principles density-functional perturbation theory with pseudopotentials and a plane-wave basis set. Lattice instabilities are observed to occur across nearly the entire Brillouin zone, excluding three interpenetrating tubes of stability along the (001) directions and small spheres of stability centered at R. The strongest instability is that of the doubly degenerate M5' mode. The atomic displacements of one of the eigenvectors of this mode generate a good approximation to the observed B19' ground-state structure.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure