Problems in Transforming EGP Teachers in China’s Universities into ESP Teachers

Because of the significant cultural and economic shifts in China along with a turn toward student-centered instruction in Universities, there was an insufficient number of English for Specific Purpose (ESP) Teachers in Chinese universities. As a result English for General Purpose (EGP) Teachers had to be transformed into ESP Teachers. The study uses 65 of the converted ESP teachers to determine the difficulties teachers had in making this transformation. Some measures used to determine the problems related to the transformation of these teachers are presented in the paper

Exploring the human-nature nexus towards effective nature-based solutions: the Aral Sea case

Incorporating societal challenges and values into the design of locally appropriate nature-based solutions (NbS) is an integral strategy for ensuring benefits for both communities and the environment. But how are human-nature relations impacted when the environments containing resources which are valued and relied on, undergo dramatic and sustained change on decadal timescales? To explore this interplay, we selected Muynak as a case study, once a thriving town on the shores of the former Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. We conducted a social survey among the residents to identify the use of natural resources and the values they assign to the most common and yet highly degraded resources in the area (wetlands, rangelands, afforested areas, the Aral Sea, and wildlife). The survey was complemented with expert interviews. Our study suggests that grasslands are the most frequently used of the resources under study, while wetlands and wildlife are generally more valued. Overall, resources were more culturally valued than financially, historically, or recreationally. The majority of respondents perceived a degradation in most natural resources over the past decade, particularly wetlands (79 %), followed by grasslands (48 %), and the Aral Sea (42 %). Wetlands were reported to be in a state of ongoing degradation by 79 % of respondents, which negatively affected the livelihoods of almost half of the households in the survey area. Afforested areas were the only resources reported to have a positive perceived change in both status and their effect on well-being. The vast majority of respondents (83 %) felt that human well-being was linked to environmental conditions. This study lays the foundation for future interventions to develop nature-based solutions to benefit both people and nature, and highlights the continuing value placed on nature by residents of an area that has suffered substantial anthropogenic degradation

Evolutionary Concepts for Decentralized Air Traffic Flow Management

Alternative concepts for modifying the policies and procedures under which the air traffic flow management system operates are described, and an approach to the evaluation of those concepts is discussed. Here, air traffic flow management includes all activities related to the management of the flow of aircraft and related system resources from 'block to block.' The alternative concepts represent stages in the evolution from the current system, in which air traffic management decision making is largely centralized within the FAA, to a more decentralized approach wherein the airlines and other airspace users collaborate in air traffic management decision making with the FAA. The emphasis in the discussion is on a viable medium-term partially decentralized scenario representing a phase of this evolution that is consistent with the decision-making approaches embodied in proposed Free Flight concepts for air traffic management. System-level metrics for analyzing and evaluating the various alternatives are defined, and a simulation testbed developed to generate values for those metrics is described. The fundamental issue of modeling airline behavior in decentralized environments is also raised, and an example of such a model, which deals with the preservation of flight bank integrity in hub airports, is presented

Choosing prevention or cure when mitigating biodiversity loss: trade-offs under ‘no net loss’ policies

1. Biodiversity cannot always be conserved. Economic development activities can result in biodiversity losses, but also increase human wellbeing, so trade-offs must sometimes be made between conservation and development. An alternative strategy to avoidance of impacts through the strict protection of biodiversity (‘prevention’) is to permit certain biodiversity losses and fully compensate for them through offsets elsewhere (‘cure’). 2. Here, we build a stochastic simulation model to explore trade-offs between biodiversity loss prevention and cure, in the context of development under ‘no net loss’ (NNL) biodiversity policies. Our model implements a Management Strategy Evaluation framework, monitoring outcomes using four different performance metrics: total biodiversity, net biodiversity, total economic activity, and development activity. 3. We find that a "cure" strategy can potentially perform just as well as a prevention strategy in terms of biodiversity objectives, whilst outperforming the latter from an economic perspective. However, this does not undermine the need for a mitigation hierarchy, and the best-performing strategy depends strongly upon both the degree of compliance with the NNL policy and upon underlying ecological parameters. 4. Perhaps counterintuitively, when evaluated as advised by the technical literature (i.e. against an appropriate counterfactual scenario), we find that net biodiversity outcomes are highest when natural ecosystem recovery rates are slow (so long as development rates are also slow). 5. Finally, using the illustrative example of US wetlands, we suggest that real-world NNL policies could already be driving landscape-scale avoidance of development impacts under a "prevention" approach. 6. Policy implications. No net loss (NNL) biodiversity policy is currently being developed or implemented by over 100 countries worldwide and incorporated into environmental safeguards by multinational lenders. The socio-ecological model presented here can be used to advise decision makers about the best structure for nascent NNL policy on the basis of region-specific ecosystem recovery rates, development activity, legal compliance and monitoring uncertainty. Further, the model presents a means for estimating the degree to which biodiversity impacts are avoided by developers under NNL – an important monitoring consideration given that ensuring high levels of avoidance is crucial to robust NNL policy, but which has to date evaded assessment through purely empirical means

Security Proof for Password Authentication in TLS-Verifier-based Three-Party Group Diffie-Hellman

The internet has grown greatly in the past decade, by some numbers exceeding 47 million active web sites and a total aggregate exceeding100 million web sites. What is common practice today on the Internet is that servers have public keys, but clients are largely authenticated via short passwords. Protecting these passwords by not storing them in the clear on institutions's servers has become a priority. This paper develops password-based ciphersuites for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that are: (1) resistant to server compromise; (2) provably secure; (3) believed to be free from patent and licensing restrictions based on an analysis of relevant patents in the area

Analyzing the outcomes of China's ecological compensation scheme for development-related biodiversity loss

Over the past three decades, China's government has implemented many projects under its ecological compensation policy, including paying compensation fees for habitat creation to redress natural habitat losses caused by development. However, a critical evaluation of both the policy design and its ecological outcomes, has not previously been carried out. We assemble diverse data sources to provide the first evaluation of China's eco-compensation policy and practice, identifying several challenges. In policy, the pricing of forest restoration fees is insufficient in several provinces, and there is no requirement for use of biodiversity metrics or for ecological equivalence of compensation and losses. In practice, only 23% of a sample of 31 developments applied quantitative biodiversity metrics, and fewer than 1% of China's local governments have disclosed information regarding compensation implementation. Thus, to improve the validity of its compensation policy and practice to better secure biodiversity, China may need to embrace higher compensation standards, having first prevented ecological losses where possible. Equally important, China may also need to improve compensation governance for data tracking and conservation effectiveness monitoring