Contribution of Non-Timber Forest Products to Rural Household Income in Zambia

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) play an important role in supporting rural livelihoods and food security in Zambia. NTFP-dependent households are poorer, have younger household heads with lower levels of education, and are located closer to district towns than other rural households are. NTFPs are a particularly important source of income in Luapula, Northwestern and Western provinces. • Income from woodfuel represented the greatest share of income for households that participated in NTFPs, and it was the most commonly reported business activity, with 68% of NTFP households reporting income from charcoal and firewood. NTFPs contribute an average of 32% to total household income among participants, with the poorest being more dependent on these sources. • Given the widespread demand for woodfuel and other forest products, it is likely that rural households will continue to engage in the extraction and trade of NTFPs as a business activity. However, charcoal production, if left unchecked, could compromise the integrity of forests and adversely affect the availability of other NTFPs. In order to reduce households’ reliance on charcoal/firewood as an income source, outreach efforts could promote other NTFPs such as wild honey, ants, and mushrooms as business activities. Mushrooms, ants, and caterpillars may particularly be important activities for female-headed households, as more female-headed households derived income from these sources.NON-TIMBER FOREST, ZAMBIA, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics,

Accelerating Change for Women and Girls: The Role of Women's Funds

In recent years, interest in philanthropy for and by women has intensified, accompanied by a growing acceptance of the idea that philanthropic investments in women and girls can accelerate positive change in communities. To understand this evolution in thinking and practice within philanthropy, the Foundation Center partnered with the Women's Funding Network, a global movement of women's funds, to chart the current landscape of philanthropy focused on women and girls and document the specific role played by women's funds

Perturbatively corrected ring-polymer instanton theory for accurate tunneling splittings

We introduce an approach for calculating perturbative corrections to the ring-polymer instanton approximation to tunneling splittings (RPI+PC), by computing higher-order terms in the asymptotic expansion in $\hbar$. The resulting method goes beyond standard instanton theory by using information on the third and fourth derivatives of the potential along the tunneling path to include additional anharmonic effects. This leads to significant improvements both in systems with low barriers and in systems with anharmonic modes. We demonstrate the applicability of RPI+PC to molecular systems by computing the tunneling splitting in full-dimensional malonaldehyde and a deuterated derivative. Comparing to both experiment and recent quantum-mechanical benchmark results, we find that our perturbative correction reduces the error from -11% to 2% for hydrogen transfer and performs even better for the deuterated case. This makes our approach more accurate than previous calculations using diffusion Monte Carlo and path-integral molecular dynamics, while being more computationally efficient.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Supporting holistic care for patients with tuberculosis in a remote Indigenous community: a case report

Context: Tuberculosis (TB) is a serious infectious disease with high rates of morbidity and mortality if left untreated. In Australia, TB has been virtually eradicated in non-Indigenous Australian-born populations but in remote Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities TB presents a rare but significant public health issue. Remote health services are most likely to encounter patients with suspected and confirmed TB diagnosis but may be unprepared for supporting someone with this disease and the complexities of balancing public health risk with patient autonomy. Issue: This case study will outline the process for diagnosis and treatment of a TB patient in a remote Cape York community. This case involved significant delay in diagnosis and required several strategies to achieve successful disease eradication. The process of treatment, however, had a significant effect on the patient’s physical health, and social and emotional wellbeing. Lessons learned: This case highlights the importance of early collaboration between medical, nursing, Indigenous health worker and allied health services and the importance of technology such as electronic information records to support opportunistic access to diagnostic services and treatment. The enactment of the TB protocol should include discussions about the consequences of any restrictions of movement, employment or social/community roles. Identifying alternative opportunities to engage in meaningful roles may reduce the impact the disease has on a patient’s quality of life

Quasi-separatrix layers and three-dimensional reconnection diagnostics for line-tied tearing modes

In three-dimensional magnetic configurations for a plasma in which no closed field line or magnetic null exists, no magnetic reconnection can occur, by the strictest definition of reconnection. A finitely long pinch with line-tied boundary conditions, in which all the magnetic field lines start at one end of the system and proceed to the opposite end, is an example of such a system. Nevertheless, for a long system of this type, the physical behavior in resistive magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) essentially involves reconnection. This has been explained in terms comparing the geometric and tearing widths [1, 2]. The concept of a quasi-separatrix layer[3, 4] was developed for such systems. In this paper we study a model for a line-tied system in which the corresponding periodic system has an unstable tearing mode. We analyze this system in terms of two magnetic field line diagnostics, the squashing factor[3-5] and the electrostatic potential difference used in kinematic reconnection studies[6, 7]. We discuss the physical and geometric significance of these two diagnostics and compare them in the context of discerning tearing-like behavior in line-tied modes. [1] G. L. Delzanno and J. M. Finn. Physics of Plasmas, 15(3):032904, 2008. [2] Y.-M. Huang and E. G. Zweibel. Physics of Plasmas, 16(4):042102, 2009. [3] E. R. Priest and P. D\'emoulin. J. Geophys. Res., 100(A12):23443-23463, 1995. [4] P. D\'emoulin, J. C. Henoux, E. R. Priest, and C. H. Mandrini. Astron. Astrophys., 308:643-655, Apr. 1996. [5] V. S. Titov and G. Hornig. Advances in Space Research, 29(7):1087-1092, 2002. [6] Y. Lau and J. M. Finn. The Astrophysical Journal, 350:672-691, Feb. 1990. [7] Y. Lau and J. M. Finn. The Astrophysical Journal, 366:577-591, 1991.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simula

Probing Natural Language Inference Models through Semantic Fragments

Do state-of-the-art models for language understanding already have, or can they easily learn, abilities such as boolean coordination, quantification, conditionals, comparatives, and monotonicity reasoning (i.e., reasoning about word substitutions in sentential contexts)? While such phenomena are involved in natural language inference (NLI) and go beyond basic linguistic understanding, it is unclear the extent to which they are captured in existing NLI benchmarks and effectively learned by models. To investigate this, we propose the use of semantic fragments---systematically generated datasets that each target a different semantic phenomenon---for probing, and efficiently improving, such capabilities of linguistic models. This approach to creating challenge datasets allows direct control over the semantic diversity and complexity of the targeted linguistic phenomena, and results in a more precise characterization of a model's linguistic behavior. Our experiments, using a library of 8 such semantic fragments, reveal two remarkable findings: (a) State-of-the-art models, including BERT, that are pre-trained on existing NLI benchmark datasets perform poorly on these new fragments, even though the phenomena probed here are central to the NLI task. (b) On the other hand, with only a few minutes of additional fine-tuning---with a carefully selected learning rate and a novel variation of "inoculation"---a BERT-based model can master all of these logic and monotonicity fragments while retaining its performance on established NLI benchmarks.Comment: AAAI camera-ready versio

Recovering Marcus Theory Rates and Beyond without the Need for Decoherence Corrections: The Mapping Approach to Surface Hopping

It is well known that fewest-switches surface hopping (FSSH) fails to correctly capture the quadratic scaling of rate constants with diabatic coupling in the weak-coupling limit, as expected from Fermi's golden rule and Marcus theory. To address this deficiency, the most widely used approach is to introduce a `decoherence correction', which removes the inconsistency between the wavefunction coefficients and the active state. Here we investigate the behavior of a new nonadiabatic trajectory method, called the mapping approach to surface hopping (MASH), on systems that exhibit incoherent rate behavior. Unlike FSSH, MASH hops between active surfaces deterministically, and can never have an inconsistency between the wavefunction coefficients and the active state. We show that MASH is not only able to describe rates for intermediate and strong diabatic coupling, but can also accurately reproduce the results of Marcus theory in the golden-rule limit, without the need for a decoherence correction. MASH is therefore a significant improvement over FSSH in the simulation of nonadiabatic reactions

Relative impact of Fiscal and Monetary Policy on the Growth of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Nigeria

In order to determine the influence of fiscal and monetary policies on the growth of SMEsin Nigeria, this study employed time series data for the period 1986-2015, adopting the OLS estimation technique. The result suggeststhat fiscal policy is more effective in stimulating the growth performance of Nigeria SMEs comparing to monetary policy. Hence, the suggestion that government should pay more attention to fiscal policy. A combination of both policies is also recommendedfor optimal performance of the SMEs sector in the Nigerian economy.JEL Codes: E63, O11, O2