Follow the Networks

On February 27, 1994, three Costa Rican engineers took an afternoon flight from San José to Managua, Nicaragua. The timing for this trip was good in more ways than one. Little by little, more than a decade of war in the region was coming to an end. The trip had a single purpose: participate in Nicaragua’s connection to the Internet. In Managua, a group of collaborators who had worked for months to establish this link awaited them. For almost three years, they had been making plans together for Nicaragua’s Internet connection through Costa Rica via an analog microwave link built in the late 60s, a decade in which the concept of Central American integration had flourished. From Costa Rica, Nicaragua would be connected to Homestead, Florida through a satellite antenna. This goal was achieved the very next day and was celebrated enthusiastically. A public event was held at the Nicaraguan university that led this initiative. After a series of training and work sessions with their Nicaraguan counterparts, the Costa Rican engineers returned to San José on March 2. Only four months later, they would repeat this process in a different setting: the new site was Panama, but the purpose and procedures were almost identical.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

Influence of agricultural land-use and pesticides on benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages in an agricultural river basin in southeast Brazil

Land-use alterations and pesticide run-offs are among the main causes for impairment in agricultural areas. We evaluated the influence of different land-uses (forest, pasture and intensive agriculture) on the water quality and on benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages on three occasions: in the dry season, wet season and at the end of the wet season. Macroinvertebrates responded to this gradient of impairment: agricultural sites had significantly lower richness numbers than forested and pasture sites, and all major invertebrate groups were significantly affected. Most taxa found in forested sites were found in pasture sites, but often with lower densities. In this case, the loss of habitats due to sedimentation and the lower complexity of substrates seem to be the disruptive force for the macroinvertebrate fauna

Electroweak parameters of the z0 resonance and the standard model

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