Sensitisation workshop for fishermen and fish traders

The Fisheries Sector in Uganda provides a vital source of food, employment, recreation, trade and socio-economic well-being for the people of this country and for the global community. The Fisheries Department was, therefore, legally established with a view to ensuring effective conservation, development and management of this natural but renewable aquatic resources for the optimum benefit of both the present and future generations. The policy of the Department recognises the interests of all those concerned with fisheries

Using a Gridded Global Dataset to Characterize Regional Hydroclimate in Central Chile

Central Chile is facing dramatic projections of climate change, with a consensus for declining precipitation, negatively affecting hydropower generation and irrigated agriculture. Rising from sea level to 6000 m within a distance of 200 km, precipitation characterization is difficult because of a lack of long-term observations, especially at higher elevations. For understanding current mean and extreme conditions and recent hydroclimatological change, as well as to provide a baseline for downscaling climate model projections, a temporally and spatially complete dataset of daily meteorology is essential. The authors use a gridded global daily meteorological dataset at 0.25° resolution for the period 1948–2008, adjusted by monthly precipitation observations interpolated to the same grid using a cokriging method with elevation as a covariate. For validation, daily statistics of the adjusted gridded precipitation are compared to station observations. For further validation, a hydrology model is driven with the gridded 0.25° meteorology and streamflow statistics are compared with observed flow. The high elevation precipitation is validated by comparing the simulated snow extent to Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images. Results show that the daily meteorology with the adjusted precipitation can accurately capture the statistical properties of extreme events as well as the sequence of wet and dry events, with hydrological model results displaying reasonable agreement with observed streamflow and snow extent. This demonstrates the successful use of a global gridded data product in a relatively data-sparse region to capture hydroclimatological characteristics and extremes

MICROFINANCE MARKET NICHES AND CLIENT PROFILES IN BOLIVIA

This paper presents and interprets descriptive statistics generated from data obtained in a survey of clients of five microfinance organizations believed to be among the best in Bolivia. These lenders represent different combinations of organizational design, lending technology, and market area of operations. Two are regulated financial intermediaries and three are NGOs. Two operate in rural areas (PRODEM and Sartawi) and three operate in urban areas (BancoSol, FIE, and Caja Los Andes). Two offer individual loans and three grant loans through joint liability groups. The paper discusses household-enterprise profiles of a sample of 622 clients and identifies terms and conditions of loan contracts with these organizations to evaluate the depth and quality of their outreach. The interpretation seeks to establish connections between key characteristics of the clients and features of the lending technologies that lead to the matching of classes of borrowers with particular organizations and that influence the choice of market niches. Data on loan sizes suggest the existence of different but broadly overlapping market niches associated with three tiers of clients. The sharpest distinction is between urban and rural clients. The matching between clients and organizations also reflects a weak but positive correlation between levels of poverty and loan sizes. According to an index of basic needs fulfillment of their clients, these organizations can be ranked as: FIE and Caja Los Andes (first tier), BancoSol (second tier), and PRODEM and Sartawi (third tier). The same ranking is obtained when clients are ordered according to loan size, the ratio of loan size to the value of sales, and the value of monthly sales. The three tiers of clients are associated with different socio-economic features of their household-enterprises: sex, education, household size, access to electricity, water supplies, and sewage facilities, employment-generating capacity of the enterprise, informality and separation of household and enterprise, occupations and the like. The development of lending technologies that do not rely on standard financial statements and collateralizable assets is a formidable innovation that explains the outreach and sustainability of these organizations. Differences in the guarantees required for loans dominate distinctions in lending technology. Trade-offs between loan size, interest rates, and guarantee requirements attract different subsets of the clientele. Joint liability seems to be appropriate for very poor people, but group borrowers eventually outgrow this relationship. Caja Los Andes and FIE have shown that it is possible to supply individual loans to poor people and be profitable. Most clients are satisfied with the services received. The lowest satisfaction concerns loan sizes and loan-size rationing may be widespread. At least in urban areas, increasing competition will force these organizations to improve their services and adjust loan sizes. All of these organizations are expanding the frontier of microfinance by developing lending technologies for a much poorer clientele than is reached by collateral-based lenders. This is a formidable achievement.Financial Economics,

A Systematic Approach to Determining the Identifiability of Multistage Carcinogenesis Models

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137771/1/risa12684_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137771/2/risa12684.pd

Desertification

IPCC SPECIAL REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAND (SRCCL) Chapter 3: Climate Change and Land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystem

Interaction-induced chaos in a two-electron quantum-dot system

A quasi-one-dimensional quantum dot containing two interacting electrons is analyzed in search of signatures of chaos. The two-electron energy spectrum is obtained by diagonalization of the Hamiltonian including the exact Coulomb interaction. We find that the level-spacing fluctuations follow closely a Wigner-Dyson distribution, which indicates the emergence of quantum signatures of chaos due to the Coulomb interaction in an otherwise non-chaotic system. In general, the Poincar\'e maps of a classical analog of this quantum mechanical problem can exhibit a mixed classical dynamics. However, for the range of energies involved in the present system, the dynamics is strongly chaotic, aside from small regular regions. The system we study models a realistic semiconductor nanostructure, with electronic parameters typical of gallium arsenide.Comment: 4 pages, 3ps figure

Probing Yukawian gravitational potential by numerical simulations. I. Changing N-body codes

In the weak field limit general relativity reduces, as is well known, to the Newtonian gravitation. Alternative theories of gravity, however, do not necessarily reduce to Newtonian gravitation; some of them, for example, reduce to Yukawa-like potentials instead of the Newtonian potential. Since the Newtonian gravitation is largely used to model with success the structures of the universe, such as for example galaxies and clusters of galaxies, a way to probe and constrain alternative theories, in the weak field limit, is to apply them to model the structures of the universe. In the present study, we consider how to probe Yukawa-like potentials using N-body numerical simulations.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures. To appear in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Multi-filter transit observations of WASP-39b and WASP-43b with three San Pedro M\'artir telescopes

Three optical telescopes located at the San Pedro M\'artir National Observatory were used for the first time to obtain multi-filter defocused photometry of the transiting extrasolar planets WASP-39b and WASP-43b. We observed WASP-39b with the 2.12m telescope in the U filter for the first time, and additional observations were carried out in the R and I filters using the 0.84m telescope. WASP-43b was observed in VRI with the same instrument, and in the i filter with the robotic 1.50m telescope. We reduced the data using different pipelines and performed aperture photometry with the help of custom routines, in order to obtain the light curves. The fit of the light curves (1.5--2.5mmag rms), and of the period analysis, allowed a revision of the orbital and physical parameters, revealing for WASP-39b a period ($4.0552947 \pm 9.65 \times 10^{-7}$ days) which is $3.084 \pm 0.774$ seconds larger than previously reported. Moreover, we find for WASP-43b a planet/star radius ($0.1738 \pm 0.0033$) which is $0.01637 \pm 0.00371$ larger in the i filter with respect to previous works, and that should be confirmed with additional observations. Finally, we confirm no evidence of constant period variations in WASP-43b.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, accepted in PASP, scheduled for the February 1, 2015 issu

A semiquantal approach to finite systems of interacting particles

A novel approach is suggested for the statistical description of quantum systems of interacting particles. The key point of this approach is that a typical eigenstate in the energy representation (shape of eigenstates, SE) has a well defined classical analog which can be easily obtained from the classical equations of motion. Therefore, the occupation numbers for single-particle states can be represented as a convolution of the classical SE with the quantum occupation number operator for non-interacting particles. The latter takes into account the wavefunctions symmetry and depends on the unperturbed energy spectrum only. As a result, the distribution of occupation numbers $n_s$ can be numerically found for a very large number of interacting particles. Using the model of interacting spins we demonstrate that this approach gives a correct description of $n_s$ even in a deep quantum region with few single-particle orbitals.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Effect of heuristics on serendipity in path-based storytelling with linked data

Path-based storytelling with Linked Data on the Web provides users the ability to discover concepts in an entertaining and educational way. Given a query context, many state-of-the-art pathfinding approaches aim at telling a story that coincides with the user's expectations by investigating paths over Linked Data on the Web. By taking into account serendipity in storytelling, we aim at improving and tailoring existing approaches towards better fitting user expectations so that users are able to discover interesting knowledge without feeling unsure or even lost in the story facts. To this end, we propose to optimize the link estimation between - and the selection of facts in a story by increasing the consistency and relevancy of links between facts through additional domain delineation and refinement steps. In order to address multiple aspects of serendipity, we propose and investigate combinations of weights and heuristics in paths forming the essential building blocks for each story. Our experimental findings with stories based on DBpedia indicate the improvements when applying the optimized algorithm