Integrated land and water management for food and environmental security

Water resource management / Food security / Environmental effects / Soil degradation / Water pollution / Watersheds / Urbanization / Public policy / Water quality / Ecosystems / Land resources / Water scarcity / Developing countries / Poverty / Households / Food supply / Economic aspects / Social aspects / Groundwater depletion / Salinity / Wetlands / Investment / Land use / Water use / Training needs assessment / Research priorities

Uncovering the unarchived web

Many national and international heritage institutes realize the importance of archiving the web for future culture heritage. Web archiving is currently performed either by harvesting a national domain, or by crawling a pre-defined list of websites selected by the archiving institution. In either method, crawling results in more information being harvested than just the websites intended for preservation; which could be used to reconstruct impressions of pages that existed on the live web of the crawl date, but would have been lost forever. We present a method to create representations of what we will refer to as a web collection's (aura): the web documents that were not included in the archived collection, but are known to have existed --- due to their mentions on pages that were included in the archived web collection. To create representations of these unarchived pages, we exploit the information about the unarchived URLs that can be derived from the crawls by combining crawl date distribution, anchor text and link structure. We illustrate empirically that the size of the aura can be substantial: in 2012, the Dutch Web archive contained 12.3M unique pages, while we uncover references to 11.9M additional (unarchived) pages

Spin-orbit interaction in a dual gated InAs/GaSb quantum well

Spin-orbit interaction is investigated in a dual gated InAs/GaSb quantum well. Using an electric field the quantum well can be tuned between a single carrier regime with exclusively electrons as carriers and a two-carriers regime where electrons and holes coexist. Spin-orbit interaction in both regimes manifests itself as a beating in the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations. In the single carrier regime the linear Dresselhaus strength is characterized by $\beta =$ 28.5 meV$\AA$ and the Rashba coefficient $\alpha$ is tuned from 75 to 53 meV$\AA$ by changing the electric field. In the two-carriers regime the spin splitting shows a nonmonotonic behavior with gate voltage, which is consistent with our band structure calculations

Lost but not forgotten: finding pages on the unarchived web

Web archives attempt to preserve the fast changing web, yet they will always be incomplete. Due to restrictions in crawling depth, crawling frequency, and restrictive selection policies, large parts of the Web are unarchived and, therefore, lost to posterity. In this paper, we propose an approach to uncover unarchived web pages and websites and to reconstruct different types of descriptions for these pages and sites, based on links and anchor text in the set of crawled pages. We experiment with this approach on the Dutch Web Archive and evaluate the usefulness of page and host-level representations of unarchived content. Our main findings are the following: First, the crawled web contains evidence of a remarkable number of unarchived pages and websites, potentially dramatically increasing the coverage of a Web archive. Second, the link and anchor text have a highly skewed distribution: popular pages such as home pages have more links pointing to them and more terms in the anchor text, but the richness tapers off quickly. Aggregating web page evidence to the host-level leads to significantly richer representations, but the distribution remains skewed. Third, the succinct representation is generally rich enough to uniquely identify pages on the unarchived web: in a known-item search setting we can retrieve unarchived web pages within the first ranks on average, with host-level representations leading to further improvement of the retrieval effectiveness for websites

Towards Promotion of Community rewards to Volunteer Community Health Workers? Lessons from Experiences of Village Health Teams in Luwero, Uganda

In the debate regarding volunteer Community Health Workers (CHWs) some argue that lack of remuneration is exploitation while others caution that any promise to pay volunteers will decrease the volunteer spirit. In this paper we discuss the possibility of community rewards for CHWs. Ethnographic fieldwork that lasted 18 months utilised methods including participant observation, FGDs, in-depth interviews and key informant interviews to gain insight into the dynamic relationship between volunteer CHWs known as Village Health Teams (VHTs) and the community. Contextual transcription was done and data was thematically analysed. Findings show that community members are willing to reward volunteer CHWs with cash, material and symbolic rewards in appreciation for their help. Factors crucial for this gesture included: care and recognition of the VHTs’ work by medical staff, fulfilment of the promises made to the community by government and exemplary behaviour by CHWs. Therefore, effort should be made to facilitate volunteer CHWs to be seen as helpful to their communities. Especially, there needs to be a smooth operation at the intersection between the VHTs, local government and medical structures. Community rewards could be a more sustainable way of motivating CHWs while a solution to health personnel shortage is sought

Selection and performance of village health teams (VHTs) in Uganda: lessons from the natural helper model of health promotion

Background: Community health worker (CHW) programmes have received much attention since the 1978 Declaration of Alma-Ata, with many initiatives established in developing countries. However, CHW programmes often suffer high attrition once the initial enthusiasm of volunteers wanes. In 2002, Uganda began implementing a national CHW programme called the village health teams (VHTs), but their performance has been poor in many communities. It is argued that poor community involvement in the selection of the CHWs affects their embeddedness in communities and success. The question of how selection can be implemented creatively to sustain CHW programmes has not been sufficiently explored. In this paper, our aim was to examine the process of the introduction of the VHT strategy in one rural community, including the selection of VHT members and how these processes may have influenced their work in relation to the ideals of the natural helper model of health promotion. Methods: As part of a broader research project, an ethnographic study was carried out in Luwero district. Data collection involved participant observation, 12 focus group discussions (FGDs), 14 in-depth interviews with community members and members of the VHTs and four key informant interviews. Interviews and FGD were recorded, transcribed and coded in NVivo. Emerging themes were further explored and developed using text query searches. Interpretations were confirmed by comparison with findings of other team members. Results: The VHT selection process created distrust, damaging the programme’s legitimacy. While the Luwero community initially had high expectations of the programme, local leaders selected VHTs in a way that sidelined the majority of the community’s members. Community members questioned the credentials of those who were selected, not seeing the VHTs as those to whom they would go to for help and support. Resentment grew, and as a result, the ways in which the VHTs operated alienated them further from the community. Without the support of the community, the VHTs soon lost morale and stopped their work. Conclusion: As the natural helper model recommends, in order for CHW programmes to gain and maintain community support, it is necessary to utilize naturally existing informal helping networks by drawing on volunteers already trusted by the people being served. That way, the community will be more inclined to trust the advice of volunteers and offer them support in return, increasing the likelihood of the sustainability of their service in the community

Application specific photonic integrated circuits through generic integration, a novel paradigm in photonics

[EN] This paper reviews our recent work on integrating photonic devices and sub-systems onto a single photonic chip, by means of generic integration.This work has been partially funded through the Spanish Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011 project ”Coupled Resonator Optical Waveguide eNgineering (CROWN)” grant no. TEC2008-06145/ TEC, by the Generalitat Valenciana through project PROMETEO/2008/092 and by the EC FP6 contract no. 004525 ePIXnet. J.D. Doménech acknowledges the FPI research grant BES-2009-018381.Muñoz Muñoz, P.; Doménech Gómez, JD.; Artundo Martínez, I.; Habib, C.; Leijtens, X.; De Vries, T.; Robbins, D.... (2011). Application specific photonic integrated circuits through generic integration, a novel paradigm in photonics. Waves. 3:58-64. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/57675S5864

Minkowski's Object: A Starburst Triggered by a Radio Jet, Revisited

We present neutral hydrogen, ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared imaging, and optical spectroscopy, of Minkowski's Object (MO), a star-forming peculiar galaxy near NGC 541. The observations strengthen evidence that star formation in MO was triggered by the radio jet from NGC 541. Key new results are the discovery of a 4.9 × 108 MOdot; double H I cloud straddling the radio jet downstream fromMO, where the jet changes direction and decollimates; strong detections of MO, also showing double structure, in UVand Hα; and numerous H II regions and associated clusters in MO. In UV, MO resembles the radio-aligned, rest-frame UV morphologies in many high-redshift radio galaxies (HzRGs), also thought to be caused by jet-induced star formation. MO's stellar population is dominated by a 7.5 Myr old, 1.9 × 107 M⊙ instantaneous burst, with a current star formation rate of 0.52 MOdot; yr-1 (concentrated upstream from where the H I column density is high). This is unlike the jet-induced star formation in Centaurus A, where the jet interacts with pre-existing cold gas; in MO, the H I may have cooled out of a warmer, clumpy intergalactic or interstellar medium as a result of jet interaction, followed by the collapse of the cooling clouds and subsequent star formation (consistent with numerical simulations). Since the radio source that triggered star formation in MO is much less luminous, and therefore more common than powerful HzRGs, and because the environment around MO is not particularly special in terms of abundant dense, cold gas, jet-induced star formation in the early universe might be even more prevalent than previously thought

Relationships between Serotonin Transporter Binding in the Raphe Nuclei, Basal Ganglia, and Hippocampus with Clinical Symptoms in Cervical Dystonia:A [C]DASB Positron Emission Tomography Study

PurposeAlterations of the central serotonergic system have been implicated in the pathophysiology of dystonia. In this molecular imaging study, we assessed whether altered presynaptic serotonin transporter (SERT) binding contributes to the pathophysiology of cervical dystonia (CD), concerning both motor and non-motor symptoms (NMS).MethodsWe assessed the non-displaceable binding potential (BPND) using the selective SERT tracer [11C]DASB and positron emission tomography (PET) in 14 CD patients and 12 age- and gender-matched controls. Severity of motor symptoms was scored using the Toronto Western Spasmodic Torticollis Rating Scale and Clinical Global Impression jerks/tremor scale. NMS for depressive symptoms, anxiety, fatigue, and sleep disturbances were assessed with quantitative rating scales. The relationship between SERT binding and clinical patient characteristics was analyzed with the Spearman’s rho test and multiple regression.ResultsWhen comparing the CD patients with controls, no significant differences in BPND were found. Higher BPND in the dorsal raphe nucleus was statistically significantly correlated (p < 0.001) with motor symptom severity (rs = 0.65), pain (rs = 0.73), and sleep disturbances (rs = 0.73), with motor symptom severity being the most important predictor of SERT binding. Furthermore, fatigue was negatively associated with the BPND in the medial raphe nucleus (rs = −0.61, p = 0.045), and sleep disorders were positively associated with the BPND in the caudate nucleus (rs = 0.58, p = 0.03) and the hippocampus (rs = 0.56, p = 0.02).ConclusionMotor symptoms, as well as pain, sleep disturbances, and fatigue in CD showed a significant relationship with SERT binding in the raphe nuclei. Moreover, fatigue showed a significant relationship with the medial raphe nucleus and sleep disorders with the caudate nucleus and hippocampus. These findings suggest that an altered serotonergic signaling in different brain areas in CD is related to different motor as well as NMS, which will further stimulate research on the role of serotonin in the pathogenesis of dystonia

Plant attributes explain the distribution of soil microbial communities in two contrasting regions of the globe

We lack strong empirical evidence for links between plant attributes (plant community attributes and functional traits) and the distribution of soil microbial communities at large spatial scales. Using datasets from two contrasting regions and ecosystem types in Australia and England, we report that aboveground plant community attributes, such as diversity (species richness) and cover, and functional traits can predict a unique portion of the variation in the diversity (number of phylotypes) and community composition of soil bacteria and fungi that cannot be explained by soil abiotic properties and climate. We further identify the relative importance and evaluate the potential direct and indirect effects of climate, soil properties and plant attributes in regulating the diversity and community composition of soil microbial communities. Finally, we deliver a list of examples of common taxa from Australia and England that are strongly related to specific plant traits, such as specific leaf area index, leaf nitrogen and nitrogen fixation. Together, our work provides new evidence that plant attributes, especially plant functional traits, can predict the distribution of soil microbial communities at the regional scale and across two hemispheres