Human Trafficking and Foreign Policy: An Introduction

[Excerpt] Human trafficking (also known as trafficking in persons) refers to the subjection of men, women, or children to exploitative conditions that may be tantamount to modern-day slavery. From a foreign policy perspective, human trafficking can be viewed as a human rights problem, a manifestation of transnational organized crime, and a violation of core international labor standards. Human trafficking also raises economic development, international migration, and global governance and security issues, and disproportionately victimizes vulnerable populations. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA, Division A of P.L. 106-386; 22 U.S.C. 7101 et seq.) defined “severe forms of trafficking in persons” to include sex trafficking induced by force, fraud, or coercion, child sex trafficking (under 18 years of age), and forced labor trafficking. The latter involves the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person—induced by force, fraud, or coercion—for the purpose of subjecting that person, including a child, to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery

Where Do Consumers in Nairobi Purchase their Food and Why Does this Matter? The Need for Investment to Improve Kenya's "Traditional" Food Marketing System

Published by Tegemeo Institute for Agricultural Policy and Developmentfood security, food policy, Kenya, food marketing system, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Q18,

OpenSPIM - an open access platform for light sheet microscopy

Light sheet microscopy promises to revolutionize developmental biology by enabling live in toto imaging of entire embryos with minimal phototoxicity. We present detailed instructions for building a compact and customizable Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM) system. The integrated OpenSPIM hardware and software platform is shared with the scientific community through a public website, thereby making light sheet microscopy accessible for widespread use and optimization to various applications.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 6 supplementary videos, submitted to Nature Methods, associated public website http://openspim.or

What Makes Agricultural Intensification Profitable for Mozambican Smallholders? An Appraisal of the Inputs Subsector and the 1996/97 DNER/SG2000 Program

This report summarizes an appraisal of input utilization and marketing in Mozambique, focusing on the following research questions: (1) What are current smallholder yields for major commodities, and what is the potential for increasing yields through the use of improved technologies? (2) To what extent are improved technologies already being used by smallholders, and is the use of improved technologies profitable? (3) How are improved seeds, fertilizer and pesticides currently produced and distributed? and (4) What are the key constraints and opportunities for increasing the use of improved technologies by smallholders?food security, food policy, improved technologies, Farm Management, Downloads July 2008-July 2009: 9, O31,

Is Agricultural Intensification Profitable For Mozambican Smallholders? An Appraisal of the Inputs Subsector and the 1996/97 DNER/Sg2000 Program

Farm Management, Downloads July 2008-June 2009: 5,

Towards a Strategy for Improving Agricultural Inputs Markets in Africa

Agribusiness, Downloads July 2008-July 2009: 19,

What Makes Agricultural Intensification Profitable for Mozambican Smallholders? An Appraisal of the Inputs Subsector and the 1996/97 DNER/SG2000 Program, Volume II: Main Report

Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Directorate of Economics, Republic of Mozambiquefood security, food policy, Mozambique, agriculture, Farm Management, Q18,

Liquidity, Markets and Trading in Action

This open access book addresses four standard business school subjects: microeconomics, macroeconomics, finance and information systems as they relate to trading, liquidity, and market structure. It provides a detailed examination of the impact of trading costs and other impediments of trading that the authors call “frictions”. It also presents an interactive simulation model of equity market trading, TraderEx, that enables students to implement trading decisions in different market scenarios and structures. Addressing these topics shines a bright light on how a real-world financial market operates, and the simulation provides students with an experiential learning opportunity that is informative and fun. Each of the chapters is designed so that it can be used as a stand-alone module in an existing economics, finance, or information science course. Instructor resources such as discussion questions, Powerpoint slides and TraderEx exercises are available online

A zone of preferential ion heating extends tens of solar radii from Sun

The extreme temperatures and non-thermal nature of the solar corona and solar wind arise from an unidentified physical mechanism that preferentially heats certain ion species relative to others. Spectroscopic indicators of unequal temperatures commence within a fraction of a solar radius above the surface of the Sun, but the outer reach of this mechanism has yet to be determined. Here we present an empirical procedure for combining interplanetary solar wind measurements and a modeled energy equation including Coulomb relaxation to solve for the typical outer boundary of this zone of preferential heating. Applied to two decades of observations by the Wind spacecraft, our results are consistent with preferential heating being active in a zone extending from the transition region in the lower corona to an outer boundary 20-40 solar radii from the Sun, producing a steady state super-mass-proportional $\alpha$-to-proton temperature ratio of $5.2-5.3$. Preferential ion heating continues far beyond the transition region and is important for the evolution of both the outer corona and the solar wind. The outer boundary of this zone is well below the orbits of spacecraft at 1 AU and even closer missions such as Helios and MESSENGER, meaning it is likely that no existing mission has directly observed intense preferential heating, just residual signatures. We predict that {Parker Solar Probe} will be the first spacecraft with a perihelia sufficiently close to the Sun to pass through the outer boundary, enter the zone of preferential heating, and directly observe the physical mechanism in action.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal on 1 August 201