Tobacco Farmer Interest and Success in Income Diversification

As farm income from tobacco production has declined in recent years, there has been increasing interest in identifying alternative sources of income for tobacco farmers in the southern United States The recent termination of the tobacco quota program has accelerated the exit of tobacco farmers and has heightened concern regarding the availability of substitutes for tobacco production. In this study, we examine factors influencing tobacco farmers’ attempts to identify profitable alternatives to tobacco, their off-farm employment behavior, and changes in acres of tobacco cultivated using survey data collected from a panel of North Carolina tobacco farmers combined with market datadiversification, farm programs, farmer survey, quota buyout, tobacco, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Financial Economics, C33, Q12, Q18,

Designing for active engagement, enabling resilience and fostering environmental change

Contemporary societies are increasingly distancing themselves from nature; driven by rapid urbanisation, biodiversity loss, lack of connection, industrialisation, loss of green space and parental fear… all factors are reducing our care/empathy for nature. Conservation and grass roots reporting highlight nature’s wellbeing, requires impactful citizen led responses. Youth leaders of our time are holding up a mirror to adult humankind, stating ‘our world is on fire’, and demanding action. It is well known that interactions with the natural world provide health benefits, resilience, and prove transformative to our attitude, values and behaviour. The My Naturewatch project facilitates people’s engagement with their local environment, and by doing so, helps its comprehension. Observations of nature help connect, engage, and foster custodians, at a time where growing separation from wildlife necessitates active engagement. The work specifically challenges our understanding of ‘designed engagement(s)’, not as passive activities but as impactful active engagements, open to all. This article proposes criteria encouraging public participation within the natural world. It presents value to NGOs, change makers, design agents, individual agents and funding bodies. Thirty experts from design, ecology, conservation, museology, engagement, rewilding, wildlife and community work, were interviewed, informing ‘design for environmental change through active engagement’. The work identifies design’s role, in creating interventions that better engage people with the surrounding natural world, yielding long-term mutual benefits. The objective fosters active public nature engagement, identifying barriers, opportunities, and pitfalls, leading to nature engaged interaction(s)

Single-step synthesis of nanostructured g-alumina with solvent reusability to maximise yield and morphological purity

The mechanism of the hydrothermal synthesis of nanostructured alumina shows that the NaOH : Al molar ratio affects not only the resulting morphology but also the yield. Successful reusability of the reaction medium opens the door to large scale manufacturing.</p

Mesoporous tertiary oxides via a novel amphiphilic approach

We report a facile biomimetic sol-gel synthesis using the sponge phase formed by the lipid monoolein as a structure-directing template, resulting in high phase purity, mesoporous dysprosium- and gadolinium titanates. The stability of monoolein in a 1,4-butanediol and water mixture complements the use of a simple sol-gel metal oxide synthesis route. By judicious control of the lipid/solvent concentration, the sponge phase of monoolein can be directly realised in the pyrochlore material, leading to a porous metal oxide network with an average pore diameter of 10 nm

Design dematerialisation: Opportunities through reduction

UN reports state that the 2020 pandemic caused little impact to ‘slow climate change’ as Covid-19 was woefully ‘inadequate at transforming our behaviour’. Given the societal and infrastructural stresses Covid has wrought, coupled with the cataclysmic inter-related ecological warnings, evidenced by a succession of devastating ‘once-in-a-thousand-year events’, the Post-Covid era constitutes a new paradigm, providing unique environmental and social challenges for designers to address. While aspirations for a ‘green recovery’ from the pandemic are yet to materialise as suitably radical policy. Extractive industries and voracious supply chains continue to drive international ecological collapse. Design in all its guises pervasively intervenes materially, culturally, economically and ultimately ecologically. In order to course-correct from a path of ecological collapse, it is imperative that the practices of design are reimagined and overhauled so that designers are able to pursue prospective ecological endeavours (not solely solution driven methods). Design Dematerialisation can be viewed from a degrowth perspective, as an act to remove material things from the world; a shift in focus from static, material things, to dynamic, living experiences. This is a massive pivot from two centuries of cultural and economic norms that encouraged the transformation of the natural world into human commodities and unwanted by-products back into the natural world as pollution. This one-directional mode of worldmaking can be characterised as a straight line, with social and environmental destruction built-in at either end

Activation of carbon dioxide and carbon disulfide by a scandium N-heterocyclic carbene complex

A Sc NHC complex readily activates three equivalents of CO2 showing ‘Frustrated Lewis Pair’ type reactivity with each metal–carbene bond, but whilst CS2 is also activated by the labile carbenes, no metal involvement is observed. Graphical abstract: Activation of carbon dioxide and carbon disulfide by a scandium N-heterocyclic carbene comple

LJETOPIS KULTURNIH ZBIVANJA U SPLITU

Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) is commonly viewed as an alternative approach to the production of diesel fuels via sources independent of crude oil. The adaptability of the FTS process allows for the selective production of shorter chain C2 to C6 hydrocarbons and has the potential to be a legitimate source of useable chemical feedstocks with high value to the chemical manufacturing industry. Interestingly, although recognised as a poison in most catalytic systems, small amounts of sulfur in iron-based FTS catalysts has been demonstrated to promote catalyst reducibility and activity towards shorter chain hydrocarbons. However, it is not known what impact sulfur has on the formation of hydrocarbonaceous surface species that have been proposed to play a pivotal role in the mediation of reactants during iron FTS. Here we apply ambient pressure CO hydrogenation at 623 K on a selection of sulfur promoted iron FTS catalysts to investigate the effect of sulfur content on hydrocarbonaceous species formation. For the first time, we report the application of inelastic neutron scattering to quantify the presence of hydrocarbonaceous species under the presence of sulfur promotion. In combination with temperature programmed oxidation, X-ray diffraction, and Raman spectroscopy, we observe how low sulfur loadings (&lt;700 ppm) perturb carbon and hydrogen retention levels. The results indicate that the presence and nature of the hydrocarbonaceous overlayer is sensitive to sulfur loading, with the reported loss in catalytic activity at high loadings correlating with the attenuation of hydrocarbonaceous surface species

Open Design: Contributions, Solutions, Processes and Projects

Open design is a catchall term for various on- and offline design and making activities. It can be used to describe a type of design process that allows for (is open to) the participation of anybody (novice or professional) in the collaborative development of something. As well as this, it can mean the distribution and unrestricted use of design blueprints and documentation for the use by others. In this paper, the authors highlight various aspects of open and collaborative design and argue for the use of new terms that address what is open and when. A range of design projects and online platforms that have open attributes are then explored, whereby these terms are applied. In terms of design, the focus is specifically on the design of physical things rather than graphical, software or system design