Working Paper 97 - Soaring Food Prices and Africa's Vulnerability and Responses: An Update

Food prices rose rapidly in 2007 and in early2008, but started falling during the second halfof 2008. Despite this fall, many African countriesare yet to recover from the severe economicand social strain caused by the suddenescalation of prices. This situation, however,has triggered renewed attention that couldboost agriculture and help it acquire its rightfulplace on Africa’s development agenda. Indeed,numerous opportunities to exploit Africa’s unusedproduction potential exist, but this requiresappropriate policy responses, accompanied byadequate investments to enhance Africa’s agriculturalrevitalization.This paper seeks to review current food priceson the continent and present a country levelvulnerability analysis that formed the basis forthe Bank’s operational and policy response tofood price increases.

Holistic framework for land settlement development project sustainability assessment : comparison of El Hierro Island hydro wind project and Sivens dam project

Project developer in the domain of land settlement project are involved with many stakeholders and are usually overflown by data relative to technical, economic and social issues. This paper contributes to the necessary multi-scale approach challenge and we propose a holistic framework that enables to describe the development process of land settlement project and assess its sustainability. It would help developers to take decisions compliant with the project complexity. In the model driven engineering perspective, the metamodel framework is described with the ISO 19440 four views to represent complex systems: architectural, structural, functional and behavioural. We confront it to describe two case studies: the successful project of hydro-wind power plant in El Hierro in the Canaries, and the Sivens Dam project in France sadly famous for its deadly outcome. Their comparison enables us to draw hypothesis on what are the ingredients of success and validate the framework

THE CAREER INFORMATION LITERACY LEARNING FRAMEWORK: A CASE STUDY OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING CAPSTONE UNITS OF AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY

Universities worldwide are under increasing pressure to ensure graduate work-readiness upon degree completion. However, the linkage between employability enhancement and disciplinary learning is problematic for many academics. To address this, a conceptual framework of student learning and career development is required. We propose the development of a Career Information Literacy Learning Framework (CILLF) by integrating three key theoretical frameworks, namely experiential learning, career development and information literacy. This study uses the CILLF to investigate capstone units, which are final year subjects. These units’ aim is to combine disciplinary knowledge and skills whilst preparing students for the next phase transitions (work, future studies or other life plans). We examine capstone units in three disciplines specifically: Information Systems, Information Technology and Engineering in an Australian university. Academic and professional staff involved in these capstone units participated in semi-structured interviews to share their insights in five areas: unit aims, current practices and resources, student outcomes, needs/concerns, and assessment/measurement. We adopted a phenomenographic approach and found patterns using SAS analysis. Our findings support the conceptualisation of the CILLF, uniting the dimensions of learning approaches, career development and information literacy. We address limitations of the research and identify further research directions

1787 the Grand Convention

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Association of the Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) with Changes in Function, Cognition, and Psychosocial Status

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111069/1/j.1532-5415.1997.tb02971.x.pd

Validation of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the quantification of human IgG directed against the repeat region of the circumsporozoite protein of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

BACKGROUND: Several pre-erythrocytic malaria vaccines based on the circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen of Plasmodium falciparum are in clinical development. Vaccine immunogenicity is commonly evaluated by the determination of anti-CSP antibody levels using IgG-based assays, but no standard assay is available to allow comparison of the different vaccines. METHODS: The validation of an anti-CSP repeat region enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is described. This assay is based on the binding of serum antibodies to R32LR, a recombinant protein composed of the repeat region of P. falciparum CSP. In addition to the original recombinant R32LR, an easy to purify recombinant His-tagged R32LR protein has been constructed to be used as solid phase antigen in the assay. Also, hybridoma cell lines have been generated producing human anti-R32LR monoclonal antibodies to be used as a potential inexhaustible source of anti-CSP repeats standard, instead of a reference serum. RESULTS: The anti-CSP repeats ELISA was shown to be robust, specific and linear within the analytical range, and adequately fulfilled all validation criteria as defined in the ICH guidelines. Furthermore, the coefficient of variation for repeatability and intermediate precision did not exceed 23%. Non-interference was demonstrated for R32LR-binding sera, and the assay was shown to be stable over time. CONCLUSIONS: This ELISA, specific for antibodies directed against the CSP repeat region, can be used as a standard assay for the determination of humoral immunogenicity in the development of any CSP-based P. falciparum malaria vaccine

Tropical polyhedra are equivalent to mean payoff games

We show that several decision problems originating from max-plus or tropical convexity are equivalent to zero-sum two player game problems. In particular, we set up an equivalence between the external representation of tropical convex sets and zero-sum stochastic games, in which tropical polyhedra correspond to deterministic games with finite action spaces. Then, we show that the winning initial positions can be determined from the associated tropical polyhedron. We obtain as a corollary a game theoretical proof of the fact that the tropical rank of a matrix, defined as the maximal size of a submatrix for which the optimal assignment problem has a unique solution, coincides with the maximal number of rows (or columns) of the matrix which are linearly independent in the tropical sense. Our proofs rely on techniques from non-linear Perron-Frobenius theory.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures; v2: updated references, added background materials and illustrations; v3: minor improvements, references update