Climate risk mapping provides rice growers with adaptation options in the Mekong River Delta

The Mekong River Delta in Vietnam accounts for over half of the country’s domestic #rice production yet is increasingly affected by climate change. Dr. Bui Tan Yen is leading a team to develop an approach known as CS-MAP, a participatory approach of climate risk mapping, which provides farmers with adaptation options

Fruit and vegetable consumption in Malaysia: a count system approach

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Unit trust performance measurement: the snail trail approach

Unit trust is an investment scheme that offers investors a well diversified portfolio managed by a professional fund manager or organisation. The investment horizon is medium to long term depending on the stipulated objective of the unit trust. Due to the long holding period and compounding effect, a slight difference in the annual rate of returns can be very detrimental to the investor. Therefore the performance of a unit trust as well as the fund manager must be carefully evaluated before committing to the fund. As we know, a high rate of returns in a single period can be very misleading if we do not study the volatility of the historical returns. Risk adjusted returns offer a solution to this problem, but this is only a "snapshot" performance measurement analysis. Snail-Trail analysis was introduced to overcome these drawbacks and better portray the dynamic history of fund manager's performance. 17 equity growth funds were selected for the purpose of this study. From the snail-trail analysis, two promising unit trusts were found to be Asia Progress and KLMF Growth. Both funds have shown improvement in relative performance from the "high return high risk" and "low return low risk" quadrant moving up to "high return low risk", the most favourable, quadrant. Meanwhile, three funds have been classified as below average as the snail trail diagrams shown deteriorating performance. These three funds are BHLB High Growth, KLMF Industry, and KLMF Aggressive Growth, the performance of which has been falling rapidly over recent years,from the "high return low risk" quadrant to "low return high risk" quadrant. Four unit trusts showing the most consistency in fund risk-return performance are SBB Premium Capital, HLB Growth, OSK Equity and RHB Capital

The Management of Residential Solid Waste in Mombasa, Kenya

Residential solid waste management refers to the managing of unwanted materials discarded by households so that these materials are either properly disposed of or reprocessed to reenter the production material stream. This issue is usually the responsibility of the municipal council; however in Kenya just like many other developing countries, this critical issue is often mismanaged, causing environmental pollution and exposing residents to health risks. Through one month of full-time archival research and field work, this study presents the current state of residential solid waste management in Mombasa, examines the roles played by various stakeholders involved in this area through personal interviews, and concludes by doing an in-depth case study of Old Town so as to develop a framework and suggestions for possible future improvements

Earthquake and volcanic processes at mid-ocean ridges

In this thesis, I present results that broadly fall into two themes. The first involves understanding active tectonic and magmatic processes at mid-ocean ridges. The second involves using small stress changes due to the tides to probe earthquake processes at mid-ocean ridges. The four main results of my thesis are as follow: (1) The spatiotemporal evolution of an eruption at a fast-spreading mid-ocean ridge, the East Pacific Rise, is now characterized and understood to be mainly controlled by the buildup of tectonic stress to a critical level rather than magma overpressure. (2) Microearthquakes at the East Pacific Rise are found to be strongly modulated by tides in the years before an eruption but not immediately after the eruption, suggesting the potential utility of tidal triggering strength for eruption forecasting. (3) Earthquake size-frequency distribution, often quantified using the b value, is shown to vary systematically with tidal stresses which lends support to the use of earthquake b value as an in-situ stressmeter. (4) The 2015 Axial Seamount eruption is revealed to be preceded by variable rates of melt influx into the shallow reservoir, highlighting the short-timescale variability of magmatic systems as they are primed for an eruption

Changes in select phenolic compounds during ethanol fermentation and acetification of raspberry, blueberry and persimmon

Polyphenols are major dietary components in fruits and vegetables. Many research and epidemiological studies have reported that phenolic compounds, such as anthocyanins, may have a protective effect against various degenerative diseases. Phenolics in grape wine have been extensively studied but information on changes of phenolics in wine and vinegar made from other fruit crops is limited, however. This research started with the objective of determining the effect of proteases in preventing phenolic and, specifically, anthocyanin degradation in the ethanolic fermentation of black raspberries to reduce sugar content. The results of this study led to investigations of changes of other polyphenols in persimmons and blueberries during both ethanolic (vinification) and vinegar (acetification) fermentations. Initial results showed that a 1% neutral bacterial protease could retain anthocyanin in open vinification of black raspberries but the protease treatment provided no benefit when a closed fermentation was used. Additional research using closed vinification followed by acetification of persimmons indicated that phenolics were significantly affected by these fermentations. Phenolics in astringent persimmons were significantly degraded during both vinification and acetification while phenolics in non-astringent persimmons actually increased during vinification but decreased during acetification. In blueberries, anthocyanin and epicatechin were increased during vinification but decreased during acetification. The lipid-protective properties of fruit wine and vinegar was also investigated. In this study of antioxidant properties, blueberry vinegar was more effective than blueberry juice or blueberry wine in preventing EPA and DHA degradation in salmon oil-in-water emulsion model system. This thesis research provides informative insights concerning changes in polyphenols, such as anthocyanin, during vinification and acetification of some fruit crops. The information is especially beneficial to the juice, wine and vinegar industries since polyphenols are one of the major health promoting constituents in fruit juices, wines and vinegars

Jacobi Elliptic Monopoleantimonopole Pair Of The Su(2) Yang-Mills-Higgs Theory

Magnetic monopoles and multimonopole are well known three dimensional topological soliton solutions of the non-Abelian SU(2) Georgi-Glashow model. They are remnants of the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the gauge group SU(2) into the group U(1) with net magnetic charge. In this thesis, the SU(2) Georgi-Glashow model or synonymously SU(2) Yang- Mills-Higgs theory is studied to seek for more magnetic monopole configurations along with their properties at the classical level. To find such configurations in the model, one need to substitute a suitable ansatz into the second order equations of motions and look for an analytical or numerical solutions. The axially symmetric Jacobi elliptic one-monopole (Teh et al. 2010) configurations were obtained by generalizing the large distance asymptotic solutions to the Jacobi elliptic functions and solving the second order field equations numerically. We study them numerically by varying its magnetic number and analyze its properties when the Higgs potential is non-vanishing. These are non-BPS, regular solutions which possess the same total energy as the generalized ’t Hooft-Polyakov monopole. Some of these monopoles are distorted and possess magnetic dipole moment

Marrying biomolecules and nanoparticles for diagnostics and nanomedicine

Noble metal nanoparticles (NPs) such as silver and gold NPs, at the size range of 1-100 nm have attracted enormous scientific and technological interest due to their unique optical, electronic and catalytic properties, which are largely determined by their size, shape and crystal structure. Inspired by the natural biomineralization process on using biomolecular templates to form a range of sophisticated inorganic nanostructures, our current research efforts focus on the development of bioinspired metal NPs with tunable physicochemical properties that incorporate the highly specific recognition function of biomolecules for a vast plethora of biomedical applications. Firstly, I will talk about the rational design of peptide and nucleic acid-based biomolecular templates for the biomimetic synthesis of multifunctional metal NPs with different optical properties (i.e., plasmon absorption and light emission) and integrated biofunctionalities for biosensing, imaging, delivery and therapy.1-7 Recently, we have designed a unique self-assembly DNA templates to form redox-responsive photoluminescent silver nanoclusters (NCs \u3c 2 nm in size) for two-way color change detection of free radicals (red-to-blue) and antioxidants (blue-to-red) in real time. These DNA-templated AgNCs are found to have excellent antimicrobial and toxin inhibition properties towards superbugs. Using bi-functional peptide templates, AuNCs with tunable emission color from visible to near-infrared wavelength have been successfully synthesized for targeted gene delivery and bioimaging applications. We have also employed this bioinspired approach to ‘turn’ the native protein into bioactive fluorescent sensors for small molecule drug screening and photodynamic therapy. The biocompatibility and adaptability of biomolecules involved in the synthesis enable an efficient control over nanostructures morphology (size and shape) with fine-tuned properties, resulting in low energy use and environmental impact. The second part of my talk will focus on the biofunctionalization strategies of nanometals for the development of ultrasensitive biosensors, to convert ‘invisible’ biological responses into easily measurable and observable optical outputs.8-13 By exploiting the plasmonic coupling, fluorescence and/or light scattering properties of the nanometals, we have developed a series of label-free optical nanosensors to detect a wide range of bioanalytes (e.g., vitamins, small molecule drug, etc.) and for studying important biomolecular interactions such as gene transcription, DNA mutation and enzymatic reaction. These bioassays are versatile, efficient and low-cost with high throughput sensing capability, which could culminate into tangible products useful for biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. References Tan, Y. N.; Lee, J. Y.; Wang, Daniel. I. C. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 5677-5686. Tan, Y. N.; Lee, J. Y.; Wang, Daniel. I. C. J. Phys. Chem. C. 2009, 113, 10887-10895 Tan, Y. N.; Lee, J. Y.; Wang, Daniel. I. C. J. Phys. Chem. C.2008, 112, 5463-5470. Yung, Y.; Luo, Z.; Teo, C.S.; Tan, Y. N.*; Xie, J.* Chem. comm., 2013, 49, 9740-9742. Yu, Y.; Li, J.; Chen, T.; Tan, Y. N.*; Xie, J.* J. Phys. Chem. C. 2015, 119, 10910–10918 Yu, Y; New, S. Y.; Xie, J.; Su, X.*; Tan, Y. N.* Chem. comm., 2014, 50, 13805-13808. Geng, J.; Goh, Walter L.P.; Zhang, C.; Lane, David.; Liu, B.; Ghadessy, Farid J*.; Tan, Y. N.* J. Mater. Chem. B. 2015,3, 5933-5937 Tan, Y. N.; Lai, A.; Su, X. Sci. Adv. Mater, 2014, 6 (7), 1460-1466. Seow N.; Tan, Y. N.*; Su, X.; Lanry Yung*, Scientific Report, 2015, 5:18293. doi: 10.1038/srep18293. Tan, Y. N.; Lee, K. H.; Su, X. RCS Advances, 2013, 3, 21604-21612. Tan, Y. N.; Lee, K. H.; Su, X. Anal. Chem. 2011, 83 (11), 4251–4257. Tan, Y. N.; Su, X.; Zhu, Y.; Lee, J. Y. ACS Nano 2010, 4, 5101–5110. Tan, Y. N.; Su, X.; Liu, Edison T.; Thomsen, J. S. Anal. Chem. 2010, 82, 2759-2765

The Impact of Sibling Sex Composition on Women's Educational Achievements: A Unique Natural Experiment by Twins Gender Shocks

In a pro-male biased society, brothers may reduce the parental investment received by female siblings, if parents face time or financial constraints. But brothers may also cause positive externalities. Using more than 12,000 firstborn twins from a highly sex-imbalanced economy, Taiwan, we test if women have fewer opportunities to attend college if they have a brother rather than a sister. To minimize the problem of sex selection, we exploit the fact that twin sex is random given the sex of the other twin, once we limit the data to time periods in which abortion was illegal and technology was unavailable to abort one of the two twins. We show that the birth of a male sibling, relative to a female, has almost no impact on women's or men's college enrollments on the average. If there is any effect, it is small and imprecise. Our results point to the importance of accounting for positive externalities (e.g., decreasing family size) created by a son's birth, in studies on sibling rivalry.education, son preference, sibling rivalry, sibling spillover, sex selective abortion, within-family allocation of resources