NONFARM EMPLOYMENT IN SMALL-SCALE FOREST-BASED ENTERPRISES: POLICY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Employment and income from non-farm activities are of increasing importance in the rural economy of developing countries. Small forest-based enterprise activities constitute one of the largest sources of such income. They also account for a large part of the total harvest from forests in many areas. Many agriculturalists supplement their income through gathering and trading products such as forest foods, medicinal plants, and fuel wood. Small-scale manufacturing of items such as furniture, baskets, mats, and craft goods constitute substantial informal sector industries. Income from these activities tends to be particularly important during seasonal shortfalls in food and cash crop income and in periods of drought or other emergencies. Ease of access to forest raw materials means that forest-based activities are particularly important for the poor and for women. However, some of the simpler activities provide very low returns to labor, and may thus provide only minimal and short-lived livelihood contributions. Some of the most important saleable forest products face uncertain markets because of growing competition from industrial or synthetic alternatives or domesticated sources of the materials. As demand grows, some activities are also threatened by depletion of, or reduced access to, forest resources. In developing policies in support of sustainable activities, it is therefore important to be able to distinguish between those that have a potential to grow and those that do not. Policy issues include regulations that discriminate against the informal sector, policies that result in the shift from managed to uncontrolled open access use of forest resources, and restrictions on private production and sale of forest products that impede the development of farm-based sources of these products.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Sex Every Afternoon: Pink Film and the Body of Pornographic Cinema in Japan.

Sex Every Afternoon: Pink Film and the Body of Pornographic Cinema in Japan is a critical reconsideration of the modes and meanings of the Pink Film; a form of soft-core, narrative, theatrical adult film produced in Japan from the 1960s to the present day. Focusing on the period between the early 1980s and the early 2010s, I combine fieldwork with historiographical and theoretical reassessments to explore this industry through the three main dimensions of its contemporary existence—the pro-filmic spaces of production at shooting locations and in studios, the imaginary and remediated realms of the pornographic image on movie and TV screens, and the physical environments of the adult specialty cinema network in Japan. In counterargument to a growing body of knowledge that has, since the rapid spread of adult video formats in Japan in the early 1980s, emphasized the material and contextual specificities of Pink Film and reified the format as an essentially filmic, distinctly theatrical, and particularly Japanese cinema, I examine the ways in which Pink Film has acted instead as a (re)productive point of translation between presumably disparate moving image technologies and audiences. I challenge the assumption that pornographic film, as a ‘body genre,’ has the unusual power to directly address or affect spectators’ bodies. I argue that while Pink Film does exhibit an intimate relationship with the bodies of producers and performers that create it, the films themselves focus as much on the spectacular coupling of media technologies as they do the simulated sexual contact of actors in the frame. I also show how adult cinema customers often have no interest in the movie at all, and instead utilize these spaces in ways that are directly disputed by theater management and disavowed by filmic narratives. Sex Every Afternoon recalibrates the ‘bodies’ of this body genre to align with the real people who create Pink Films. It issues a challenge to film and pornography studies by arguing that a close textual and contextual evaluation of this medium reveals that the romantic relationship between the moving image and the living spectator is, at best, uncertain.PHDIndependent Interdepartmental Degree ProgramUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116708/1/maiku_1.pd

Running the penultimate lap of the race: a multi-method analysis of growth, generativity, career orientation and personality amongst men in mid/late career

The dynamics of development in mid/late career are relatively uncharted territory in empirical research and represent a point of intersection between work/organizational psychology and lifespan developmental psychology. Using multimethod data from a study of 41 men aged between 45 and 55, we investigated the correlates and compatibility of two key developmental phenomena at this career stage: personal growth and generativity. We found that a forward momentum career orientation (not necessarily in the form of hierarchical advancement) was positively associated with personal growth and generativity, whereas a preoccupation with career maintenance had strong negative relationships with both. However, men's orientation towards their career did not uniquely predict growth or generativity when these variables were also regressed on the personality traits of ego resiliency and ego development, suggesting that personality more than subjective career stage is the root of a positive experience of mid/late career. We also conclude that the importance of personal growth is not confined to the first half of career and that contributing to others (i.e., generativity) is compatible with the ostensibly self-focused concerns of growth. Differences between findings from self-report questionnaire and coded interview narratives suggest that method matters in the investigation of these constructs

Wafer-Scale Nanopatterning and Translation into High-Performance Piezoelectric Nanowires

The development of a facile method for fabricating one-dimensional, precisely positioned nanostructures over large areas offers exciting opportunities in fundamental research and innovative applications. Large-scale nanofabrication methods have been restricted in accessibility due to their complexity and cost. Likewise, bottom-up synthesis of nanowires has been limited in methods to assemble these structures at precisely defined locations. Nanomaterials such as PbZr_xTi_(1−x)O_3 (PZT) nanowires (NWs)—which may be useful for nonvolatile memory storage (FeRAM), nanoactuation, and nanoscale power generation—are difficult to synthesize without suffering from polycrystallinity or poor stoichiometric control. Here, we report a novel fabrication method which requires only low-resolution photolithography and electrochemical etching to generate ultrasmooth NWs over wafer scales. These nanostructures are subsequently used as patterning templates to generate PZT nanowires with the highest reported piezoelectric performance (d_(eff) ~ 145 pm/V). The combined large-scale nanopatterning with hierarchical assembly of functional nanomaterials could yield breakthroughs in areas ranging from nanodevice arrays to nanodevice powering

Feasibility of Rooftop Wind Turbines in Boston

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources is committed to assessing new forms of renewable energy. This project determined the feasibility of rooftop wind turbines in Boston. We interviewed and consulted major stakeholders, and considered siting factors, turbine technology, economic feasibility and social reactions. Currently, rooftop wind turbines are not economically viable in Boston due to long payback periods resulting from siting challenges and underdeveloped technology. We recommend research into urban siting methods as well as vertical axis wind turbines

Separation of suspended particles in microfluidic systems by directional-locking in periodic fields

We investigate the transport and separation of overdamped particles under the action of a uniform external force in a two-dimensional periodic energy landscape. Exact results are obtained for the deterministic transport in a square lattice of parabolic, repulsive centers that correspond to a piecewise-continuous linear-force model. The trajectories are periodic and commensurate with the obstacle lattice and exhibit phase-locking behavior in that the particle moves at the same average migration angle for a range of orientation of the external force. The migration angle as a function of the orientation of the external force has a Devil's staircase structure. The first transition in the migration angle was analyzed in terms of a Poincare map, showing that it corresponds to a tangent bifurcation. Numerical results show that the limiting behavior for impenetrable obstacles is equivalent to the high Peclet number limit in the case of transport of particles in a periodic pattern of solid obstacles. Finally, we show how separation occurs in these systems depending on the properties of the particles