“Bright spots” in Uzbekistan, reversing land and water degradation while improving livelihoods: key developments and sustaining ingredients for transition economies of the former Soviet Union

Irrigated farming / Water quality / Drainage / Soil fertility / Crop yield / Investment / Uzbekistan / Bukhara Province / Zarafshan River / Dijzzakh Province / Syrdarya Province

Subterranean glacial spillways: an example from the karst of South Wales, UK

Many karst areas in the UK have been glaciated one or more times during the last 0.5 Ma, yet there are few documented examples of caves in these regions being affected by glacial processes other than erosion. The karst of South Wales is one area where sub or pro-glacial modification of pre-existing caves is thought to occur. Evidence from the Ogof Draenen cave system suggests that caves can sometimes act as subterranean glacial ‘underspill’ channels for melt-water. This cave, one of the longest in Britain with a surveyed length of over 70 km, underlies the interfluve between two glaciated valleys. Sediment fills and speleo-morphological observations indicate that melt-water from a high level glacier in the Afon Lwyd valley (>340m asl) filled part of the cave and over-spilled into the neighbouring Usk valley, temporarily reversing non-glacial groundwater flow directions in the cave. It is suggested that this may have occurred during a Middle Pleistocene glaciation

Employee Benefits Managers’ Understanding of Occupational Therapy and Their Influence on Employees’ Knowledge

This study investigated what employee benefits managers know about occupational therapy and the influence they have on employees’ knowledge of, and access to, occupational therapy services. This qualitative research focused on what employee benefits managers know about occupational therapy, how they learned what they know, how they prefer to learn about healthcare services in general, and the reasons they would or would not recommend occupational therapy services to their employees. The study included ten semi-structured interviews with ten employee benefits managers who were employed at nine different organizations. The interviews were coded and analyzed to develop categories and themes in accordance with grounded theory principles. Four primary results emerged from the data. The participants had little or no knowledge of occupational therapy. They learned about occupational therapy through informal, inconsistent methods while at their current job. The participants’ preferred sources for healthcare related information; benefits brokers, seminars/webinars, and employee benefits manager-related organizations, had not provided them with any education on occupational therapy. The participants consistently reported that employee benefits managers could influence what their employees know about occupational therapy and employee access to occupational therapy services, but they did not know enough about occupational therapy to discuss it with employees. These findings can help guide future research, education, and advocacy efforts to improve stakeholders’ knowledge of occupational therapy and the ability for potential clients to learn about and access occupational therapy services

Resilience: a lived experience

Contemporary Australia is seeing a renewed national focus on northern development (above the Tropic of Capricorn), with agriculture as an important component. The history of agricultural production in northern Australia is one of constant perturbations. Therefore, it was seen as essential to seek the views of those with lengthy experience in the industry to determine what factors might contribute to their resilience. A qualitative Grounded Theory approach through two distinct (but non-sequential) processes - the first literature-based, and the second in-depth semi-structured interviews, addressed these objectives: (1) Determine whether a study of the context, personal strategies, perspectives and operating environment of individuals (now and in the past), could identify and understand the factors and strategies that contribute to or enhance an individual's chance of achieving successful outcomes; (2) Determine whether such factors and strategies might improve planning and policy, particularly in the consideration and reduction of industry risk. To address these objectives, the context in which Northern Australian agriculture has operated was considered in order to understand the nature of industry perturbations, and to identify and understand the factors and operational environment that both influence and contributes to the ability (or otherwise) of individual industry participants to survive and prosper. Phenomenographic analysis of 66 interviews, conducted across a range of farms and related agencies, identified four themes of (1) Situational Awareness, (2) the Ability to Plan, (3) the Ability to Adapt, and (4) Social Connectedness: which illustrate resilience strategies farmers used. Inter-twined through these was the Perception of Fairness, which relates these attributes to a broader sense of agency, and which acts as an enabler of the resilience individuals derive from the implementation of their strategies. It is proposed that this sense of fairness needs to be fostered through ensuring a deliberate process of engagement, consideration, and inclusion of impacted communities during policy development, particularly for policy that bonds communities and cultures within their environment. This identification of the Situational Awareness, the Ability to Plan, the Ability to Adapt, Social Connectedness and perception of Fairness through a Grounded Theory Approach contributes a new understanding of resilience. This understanding is from the perspective of those who have lived the experience, rather than predetermined notions of what constitutes resilience. In different ways, these factors may also apply for those who have left the industry, and for people in other contexts

Critical fluctuations of noisy period-doubling maps

We extend the theory of quasipotentials in dynamical systems by calculating, within a broad class of period-doubling maps, an exact potential for the critical fluctuations of pitchfork bifurcations in the weak noise limit. These far-from-equilibrium fluctuations are described by finite-size mean field theory, placing their static properties in the same universality class as the Ising model on a complete graph. We demonstrate that the effective system size of noisy period-doubling bifurcations exhibits universal scaling behavior along period-doubling routes to chaos.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure