Collective Agency in the Making: How Social Innovations in the Food System Practice Democracy beyond Consumption

As the deleterious impacts of conventional food systems on areas including public health, environmental sustainability, and farmers’ livelihoods are progressively unveiled, citizen-led initiatives have ubiquitously sprouted, collectively building what is now known as the alternative food system. Despite recent academic interest in the role of alternative food initiatives in countering a narrow view of democracy based on market-based purchasing power, little attention has been paid to a specific democratizing feature that allows for collective expression beyond consumption, that of collective agency. This article argues that it is precisely by focusing on collective agency as the driving force for food systems’ change that we can recognize the diverse contributions of social innovations to the democratization of food systems. By engaging with the reasonings of consumer sovereignty proponents, building on academic literature on the concept of collective agency, and drawing from empirical work with over a hundred local social innovations of the global North, this article proposes an agency typology that allows for parsing out its different dimensions, highlighting social innovations’ key role as agency enablers and agents of change in the democratization of food systems

Rotochemical Heating of Neutron Stars: Rigorous Formalism with Electrostatic Potential Perturbations

The electrostatic potential that keeps approximate charge neutrality in neutron star matter is self-consistently introduced into the formalism for rotochemical heating presented in a previous paper by Fernandez and Reisenegger. Although the new formalism is more rigorous, we show that its observable consequences are indistinguishable from those of the previous one, leaving the conclusions of the previous paper unchanged.Comment: 14 pages, including 4 eps figures. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Ecodesenvolvimento, Desenvolvimento Sustentável e Economia Ecológica: em que sentido representam alternativas ao paradigma de desenvolvimento tradicional?

The reasons why scholars choose one paradigm to the detriment of another are not only scientific but also epistemological. This theoretical-epistemological amalgam, in its turn, provides a certain specific kind of economic development proposals. Neoclassical economics is closely connected with logical positivism (as an epistemological approach) and favors the conception that the virtually unlimited economic growth would be a necessary (and sufficient) condition to economic development. The strong reliance on economic growth in GDP-terms as an adequate indicator of economic development reflects and exemplifies the dominance of the mainstream in Economics at all three levels: methodological/epistemological, theoretical and pragmatic/political. When faced with new challenges such as the need for a Sustainable Development, for instance, and the persistence (or even the increase) of the economic inequality between North and South, the shortcomings of the dominant paradigm become accentuated. In this paper we argue that, in order to overcome this state of affairs, alternatives to the mainstream ought to be discussed and articulated at all three levels mentioned above, and that this goal has been followed by the Eco-development/Sustainable Development proposal

MODELLING TOURISM DEMAND: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS AND THE BOX-JENKINS METHODOLOGY

This study seeks to investigate and highlight the usefulness of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) methodology as an alternative to the Box-Jenkins methodology in analysing tourism demand. To this end, each of the above-mentioned methodologies is centred on the treatment, analysis and modelling of the tourism time series: “Nights Spent in Hotel Accommodation per Month”, recorded in the period from January 1987 to December 2006, since this is one of the variables that best expresses effective demand. The study was undertaken for the North and Centre regions of Portugal. The results showed that the model produced by using the ANN methodology presented satisfactory statistical and adjustment qualities, suggesting that it is suitable for modelling and forecasting the reference series, when compared with the model produced by using the Box?Jenkins methodology.Artificial Neural Networks; ARIMA Models; Time Series Forecasting

A multilayer network approach for guiding drug repositioning in neglected diseases

Drug development for neglected diseases has been historically hampered due to lack of market incentives. The advent of public domain resources containing chemical information from high throughput screenings is changing the landscape of drug discovery for these diseases. In this work we took advantage of data from extensively studied organisms like human, mouse, E. coli and yeast, among others, to develop a novel integrative network model to prioritize and identify candidate drug targets in neglected pathogen proteomes, and bioactive drug-like molecules. We modeled genomic (proteins) and chemical (bioactive compounds) data as a multilayer weighted network graph that takes advantage of bioactivity data across 221 species, chemical similarities between 1.7 105 compounds and several functional relations among 1.67 105 proteins. These relations comprised orthology, sharing of protein domains, and shared participation in defined biochemical pathways. We showcase the application of this network graph to the problem of prioritization of new candidate targets, based on the information available in the graph for known compound-target associations. We validated this strategy by performing a cross validation procedure for known mouse and Trypanosoma cruzi targets and showed that our approach outperforms classic alignment-based approaches. Moreover, our model provides additional flexibility as two different network definitions could be considered, finding in both cases qualitatively different but sensible candidate targets. We also showcase the application of the network to suggest targets for orphan compounds that are active against Plasmodium falciparum in high-throughput screens. In this case our approach provided a reduced prioritization list of target proteins for the query molecules and showed the ability to propose new testable hypotheses for each compound. Moreover, we found that some predictions highlighted by our network model were supported by independent experimental validations as found post-facto in the literature.Fil: Berenstein, Ariel José. Fundación Instituto Leloir; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Física; ArgentinaFil: Magariños, María Paula. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús). Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús); ArgentinaFil: Chernomoretz, Ariel. Fundación Instituto Leloir; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Física; ArgentinaFil: Fernandez Aguero, Maria Jose. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús). Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús); Argentin

Radio observations of evaporating objects in the Cygnus OB2 region

We present observations of the Cygnus OB2 region obtained with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) at frequencies of 325 and 610 MHz. In this contribution we focus on the study of proplyd-like objects (also known as free-floating evaporating gas globules or frEGGs) that typically show an extended cometary morphology. We identify eight objects previously studied at other wavelengths and derive their physical properties by obtaining their optical depth at radio-wavelengths. Using their geometry and the photoionization rate needed to produce their radio-continuum emission, we find that these sources are possibly ionized by a contribution of the stars Cyg OB2 #9 and Cyg OB2 #22. Spectral index maps of the eight frEGGs were constructed, showing a flat spectrum in radio frequencies in general. We interpret these as produced by optically thin ionized gas, although it is possible that a combination of thermal emission, not necessarily optically thin, produced by a diffuse gas component and the instrument response (which detects more diffuse emission at low frequencies) can artificially generate negative spectral indices. In particular, for the case of the Tadpole we suggest that the observed emission is not of non-thermal origin despite the presence of regions with negative spectral indices in our maps.Fil: Isequilla, Natacha Laura. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas; ArgentinaFil: Fernandez Lopez, Manuel. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Benaglia, Paula. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Ishwara Chandra, C. H.. National Center For Radio Astrophysics; IndiaFil: del Palacio, Santiago. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas; Argentin

Spirituality and compliance correlates of hemodialysis patients

The purpose of a study of spirituality and its relationship to the compliance of hemodialysis patients is to consider changing the approach of the treatment team in the dialysis setting. The interdisciplinary treatment team at the dialysis center consists of physicians, nurses, dietitians, and social workers. One of the many roles of the dialysis social worker is to facilitate the adjustment to and acceptance of the patient\u27s need for dialysis

Opposite developmental trends for false recognition of basic and superordinate names

This study investigated the development of false memories for basic and superordinate names using the DRM procedure. Two experiments were conducted with younger (3 5 years old) and older (10 12 years old) children. In the first experiment the DRM procedure was used with categorised lists and in the second experiment both types of lists*categorised and associative*were applied. False recognition for basic and superordinate names showed opposite developmental trends, regardless of list type. False recognition increased for critical-basic items and decreased for critical-superordinate items with age. These opposing results are mainly explained by age differences in conceptual knowledge and editing processes