The stuff of legend: diamonds and development in southern Africa

This essay establishes four propositions. First, the diamond industry has been a positive force for development in southern Africa. Second, jewelry, among the most profitable segments of the industry, is a non-essential luxury, and accordingly, consumer concerns over conflict diamonds pose a long-term threat to the industry. Third, key in conflict diamonds is violent political conflict, not diamonds per se. Fourth, the continuing challenges shared by the industry, the NGOs, and public sector are to strengthen the Kimberley Process Certification System (KPCS) to eradicate trade in conflict diamonds and to enhance the related Diamond Development Initiative to regularize artisanal production and bring the diggers into the system.diamonds, resource curse, Kimberley process, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia

Improving Commercialization of Environmental Technologies through EPA\u27s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program

This report was prepared for the National Center for Environmental Research (NCER), a division of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). NCER runs the EPA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. This report explores, through background research, interviews, and analysis, how environmental technology travels along the technology continuum to identify ways to be effectively commercialized. The major outcome for this project is recommendations for EPA on how to further develop their SBIR program to commercialize a greater percentage of technologies

The stuff of legend: diamonds and development in southern Africa

This essay establishes four propositions. First, the diamond industry has been a positive force for development in southern Africa. Second, jewelry, among the most profitable segments of the industry, is a non-essential luxury, and accordingly, consumer concerns over conflict diamonds pose a long-term threat to the industry. Third, key in conflict diamonds is violent political conflict, not diamonds per se. Fourth, the continuing challenges shared by the industry, the NGOs, and public sector are to strengthen the Kimberley Process Certification System (KPCS) to eradicate trade in conflict diamonds and to enhance the related Diamond Development Initiative to regularize artisanal production and bring the diggers into the system

Putting 'vulnerable groups' at the centre of adaptation interventions by promoting transformative adaptation as a learning process

Report submitted to the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)This report is a follow up and deepening of the working paper, “Climate change interventions and vulnerability reduction in developing countries: Challenges and leverage points for transformation”. In that backgrounder, we highlighted that many adaptation interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability (Eriksen et al. 2021a), which is also reflected in the concept of ‘maladaptation’ that was recently foregrounded in the recent IPCC AR6 WGII Report (IPCC 2022). Maladaptation frequently stems from overly technical adaptation programming that is top-down and driven by outside objectives and knowledge. Instead, there is increasing recognition of adaptation as a socio-political process that addresses the root causes of the vulnerability of communities or segments of the population and, in so doing, builds the capacities of impacted populations and communities to engage climate challenges. This approach is termed ‘transformative adaptation’ and requires engagement with governance and institutional questions about whose values and perspectives are embraced within adaptation planning, and considering justice in these processes. This background paper highlights the kinds of practice that can help avoid maladaptive outcomes and promote transformative adaptation. Through case study examples of projects that - at least partially - embody aspects of a reflexive approach, the paper identifies ‘checklists’ of positive features to encourage and ‘red flags’ to be questioned or avoided in project proposal evaluation.NORA

The other topological twisting of N=4 Yang-Mills

We present the alternative topological twisting of N=4 Yang-Mills, in which the path integral is dominated not by instantons, but by flat connections of the COMPLEXIFIED gauge group. The theory is nontrivial on compact orientable four-manifolds with nonpositive Euler number, which are necessarily not simply connected. On such manifolds, one finds a single topological invariant, analogous to the Casson invariant of three-manifolds.Comment: 19 (big), 13 (little) pages, LaTeX. (Type b or l when prompted.) Files are also available from http://www.tau.ac.il/~neil/links/papers/flat/ or http://www.tau.ac.il/~neilm/.Me/papers/flat

Causation events of stud laceration injuries in rugby union

Laceration injuries in rugby union account for approximately 6% of all injuries sustained during match play. Commentators often cite the design of studded footwear as a causal factor in laceration injuries. In order to assess the laceration injury risk of different stud designs, there is a need to develop a testing protocol that is able to replicate the laceration injury event. This study used a questionnaire to identify the play scenarios that result in laceration injuries. The questionnaire was answered by 191 rugby players, of which 72% had experienced one or more stud injuries during their career which hindered them playing rugby. Half of the laceration injuries described by the respondents came from the ruck, and 27% from a tackle. When analysing free-text responses, a deliberate stamp was described in 35% of the responses and a tackle from behind was described in 14% of responses. These injury scenarios are considered to be the dominant cause of laceration injuries. In future work the identified injury scenarios will be replicated in simulated play and kinetic and kinematic measurements will be recorded. This will inform test parameters for future assessment of laceration injury risk of stud designs

On the number of touching pairs in a set of planar curves

Given a set of planar curves (Jordan arcs), each pair of which meets -- either crosses or touches -- exactly once, we establish an upper bound on the number of touchings. We show that such a curve family has $O(t^2n)$ touchings, where $t$ is the number of faces in the curve arrangement that contains at least one endpoint of one of the curves. Our method relies on finding special subsets of curves called quasi-grids in curve families; this gives some structural insight into curve families with a high number of touchings.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Self-Dual Supergravity from N=2 Strings

A new heterotic N=2 string with manifest target space supersymmetry is constructed by combining a conventional N=2 string in the right-moving sector and a Green-Schwarz-Berkovits type string in the left-moving sector. The corresponding sigma model is then obtained by turning on background fields for the massless excitations. We compute the beta functions and we partially check the OPE's of the superconformal algebra perturbatively in $\alpha'$, all in superspace. The resulting field equations describe N=1 self-dual supergravity.Comment: 32 pages, Latex, discussion in pages 10, 11 revised so that it is compatible with the complex structure chosen in Appendix A. Appendix A slightly expanded. Final versio