Training on Establishing Climate-Smart Villages (CSVs) in Myanmar to Improve Food Security and Resilience in Agriculture

This training on establish Climate-Smart Villages (CSVs) in Myanmar was a collaborative effort of the Food Security Working Group (FSWG) and the Myanmar Program of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction. This was supported in part by donors of the FSWG and the International Development Research Center-Canada through the 3-year action research project of IIRR-Myanmar in 4 CSVs. The overall goal of this training was to increase the understanding of the concepts, processes and tools in implementing of CSVs as an approach to build climate resilience among small-holder farmers, achieve nutrition security and gender equality in Myanmar. It was aimed for local NGOs and members of the Food Security Working Group (FSWG), Myanmar’s largest alliance of development organizations advocating for food security and sustainable livelihoods in Myanmar. This training was part of IIRR-Myanmar’s out-scaling pathway by engaging and building capacities of local civil societies to replicate the CSV approach as platforms to promote climate smart agriculture in Myanmar

Behavioural simulation of biological neuron systems using VHDL and VHDL-AMS

The investigation of neuron structures is an incredibly difficult and complex task that yields relatively low rewards in terms of information from biological forms (either animals or tissue). The structures and connectivity of even the simplest invertebrates are almost impossible to establish with standard laboratory techniques, and even when this is possible it is generally time consuming, complex and expensive. Recent work has shown how a simplified behavioural approach to modelling neurons can allow “virtual” experiments to be carried out that map the behaviour of a simulated structure onto a hypothetical biological one, with correlation of behaviour rather than underlying connectivity. The problems with such approaches are numerous. The first is the difficulty of simulating realistic aggregates efficiently, the second is making sense of the results and finally, it would be helpful to have an implementation that could be synthesised to hardware for acceleration. In this paper we present a VHDL implementation of Neuron models that allow large aggregates to be simulated. The models are demonstrated using a system level VHDL and VHDL-AMS model of the C. Elegans locomotory system

Location, Movement and Memory: an Ethnographic study of journeys of asylum seekers and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa into Europe and North East England.

This thesis consists of an ethnographic study of asylum seekers and refugees arriving in North East England from sub-Saharan Africa. The ethnography is created by focussing on the life stories of four individuals known to the author. The information gathered is the result of participant observation in the African community on Teesside over a period of ten years. The study is further developed by focussing on one informant in particular. The author engages critically with Gregory Bateson’s theory of double-bind and this becomes the grounded theory for the study. The author reflects on her own experience as a migrant from South Africa to the United Kingdom. This auto-ethnography explains some of the author’s knowledge, experience and commitments and alerts the reader to possible hermeneutical bias. Further depth is added to the study by the author’s report on her own journey (undertaken with the support of a Churchill Trust travelling scholarship) from the refugee camp in Kakuma (northern Kenya) to Cairo, Tripoli and Malta; and by her accounts of social events in the asylum seeker and refugee community on Teesside. The author identifies a number of important factors in relation to sustaining personal identity in the face of traumatic experiences and forced relocation: memory, language, food, belief and hope. These factors are explored in the relevant literature. The implications of these factors for successful integration into the host community, and the tensions to which they give rise, are explored. It is hoped that this study might help the local host community to better understand the experiences and priorities of asylum seekers and refugees arriving on Teesside and that it might also help to inform local government policy regarding how they are treated. This will become increasingly important as larger numbers of asylum seekers and refugees arrive. The study will need to be broadened to encourage the experiences of Syrian refugees (the largest group currently arriving in Teesside)

Quartz Hodoscope: Assembly, Calibration, And Data Analysis

The quartz hodoscope, which is a major component of the trigger system in the Super High Momentum Spectrometer at Jefferson Lab, has been constructed, tested, and analyzed at North Carolina A&T State University. The SHMS spectrometer will play a major role in the 12- GeV physics program at Hall-C of Jefferson Lab. The hodoscope detector is comprised of twenty-one quartz bars, each connected to a pair of photomultiplier tubes. The detector uses Cherenkov radiation to allow for the clean and precise detection of high-energy particles and the suppression of background noise. The scientific motivation, hodoscope construction, and relevant results will be presented

European Capacity for Monitoring and Assimilating Space-based Climate Change Observations - Status and Prospects

This report, which is based on the findings of a workshop at Ispra in March 2009, provides the scientific background to a forthcoming Commission response to the Space and Competitiveness councils requests that the commission assess the needs for full access to standardised climate change data, the means to provide these data and together with ESA, EUMETSAT and the scientific community define how GMES services can contribute effectively to providing these data. The report therefore focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on space-based Climate data sources. Standardised climate data are needed for climate monitoring, prediction and research, while climate information informs the policy cycle at four key points - Policy definition; Management and scenario building; Reporting requirements; Alarm functions. The workshop identified the 44 Essential Climate Variables defined by GCOS as the minimum set of standardised climate data that the commission should be considering and a gap analysis for the provision of these observations was undertaken. In addition European capacity is analysed according to maturity, differentiating between sustained operational capacity (Envelope Missions/EUMETSAT), non-operationally funded repetitive capacity and additional infrastructure needs in order to fill the gaps are identified. Finally the report discusses co-ordination and governance issues and how to overcome them. The key findings and recommendations are contained in an executive summary.JRC.DDG.H.2-Climate chang

Challenges to effective collaboration in cross-cultural virtual teams

Multinational organisations are increasingly adopting geographically distributed cross-cultural virtual teams to accomplish projects. As organisations seek to exploit the benefits of such teams, they may confront a number of challenges. This research explored challenges to effective partnership in cross-cultural virtual teams through an in-depth case study of the Ghana subsidiary of a multinational organisation in the telecommunications industry. It is an interpretive study based on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews. The study finds that temporal, linguistic, and cultural issues present significant challenges to effective teamwork. The paper discusses implications of the findings for the effective management of cross-cultural virtual teams