Land Reform and Sustainable Development

Land reform, equitable distribution, economic development, environmental quality, land reform strategies, Brazil, Landless Workers’ Movement, East Asia, rural poverty, land productivity, sustainable agriculture, comparative advantage, small farms.Land reform, equitable distribution, economic development, environmental quality, land reform strategies, Brazil, Landless Workers’ Movement, East Asia, rural poverty, land productivity, sustainable agriculture, comparative advantage, small farms.

Lighting Quality for all

CIBSE & SLL International Lighting Conferenc

The Present and Future of Lighting Research

The aim of this paper is to consider where lighting research is today and what its future might be. There is little doubt that, today, lighting research is an active field. A brief review of the topics being studied reveals that they range from residual studies on visibility and visual discomfort, through attempts to identify the influence of lighting on factors beyond visibility such as mood and behaviour, to the whole new field of light and health. But activity alone is not enough to justify a future. For lighting research to have a future it is necessary for it to be influential. To become influential, research needs to focus its attention on outcomes that matter to people and the elements of those outcomes on which lighting is known to have a major influence. Further, researchers will have to be determined to overcome the barriers to changing lighting practice. By doing this, lighting research may change the world for the better, to be an important topic, not an irrelevance

Library Economic Metrics: Examples of the Comparison of Electronic and Print Journal Collections and Collection Services

published or submitted for publicatio

Do Childhood Vaccines Have Non-Specific Effects on Mortality

A recent article by Kristensen et al. suggested that measles vaccine and bacille Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine might\ud reduce mortality beyond what is expected simply from protection against measles and tuberculosis. Previous reviews of the potential effects of childhood vaccines on mortality have not considered methodological features of reviewed studies. Methodological considerations play an especially important role in observational assessments, in which selection factors for vaccination may be difficult to ascertain. We reviewed 782 English language articles on vaccines and childhood mortality and found only a few whose design met the criteria for methodological rigor. The data reviewed suggest that measles vaccine delivers its promised reduction in mortality, but there is insufficient evidence to suggest a mortality benefit above that caused by its effect on measles disease and its sequelae. Our review of the available data in the literature reinforces how difficult answering these considerations has been and how important study design will be in determining the effect of specific vaccines on all-cause mortality.\u

Studies on Monstereae (Araceae) of Borneo II: Furtado's Rhaphidophora kinabaluensis elucidated and transferred to Scindapsus (Araceae)

Rhaphidophora kinabaluensis Furtado (Araceae: Monstereae), described from Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, has been recollected and revealed to be a species of Scindapsus Schott belonging to a species complex surrounding S. co- riaceus Engl. The taxonomic transfer is made – S. kinabaluensis (Furtado) Kartini & P. C. Boyce, comb. nov. – and a description, colour illustrations and list of specimens are provided. De ning characteristics and current taxonomy of the Scindapsus Coriaceus Complex are summarized

A fully resolved active musculo-mechanical model for esophageal transport

Esophageal transport is a physiological process that mechanically transports an ingested food bolus from the pharynx to the stomach via the esophagus, a multi-layered muscular tube. This process involves interactions between the bolus, the esophagus, and the neurally coordinated activation of the esophageal muscles. In this work, we use an immersed boundary (IB) approach to simulate peristaltic transport in the esophagus. The bolus is treated as a viscous fluid that is actively transported by the muscular esophagus, which is modeled as an actively contracting, fiber-reinforced tube. A simplified version of our model is verified by comparison to an analytic solution to the tube dilation problem. Three different complex models of the multi-layered esophagus, which differ in their activation patterns and the layouts of the mucosal layers, are then extensively tested. To our knowledge, these simulations are the first of their kind to incorporate the bolus, the multi-layered esophagus tube, and muscle activation into an integrated model. Consistent with experimental observations, our simulations capture the pressure peak generated by the muscle activation pulse that travels along the bolus tail. These fully resolved simulations provide new insights into roles of the mucosal layers during bolus transport. In addition, the information on pressure and the kinematics of the esophageal wall due to the coordination of muscle activation is provided, which may help relate clinical data from manometry and ultrasound images to the underlying esophageal motor function