A Share in the Harvest- A Feasiblity study for community supported agriculture

This feasibility study looks at how community supported agriculture (CSA) can help in the development of local and sustainable food economies. It investigates community involvement in farming around the globe and in a number of established and planned CSA initiatives in England. Eleven case studies provide the basis of discussion, along with relevant policy recommendations and areas for future research. The benefits of CSA include a more secure income and higher returns for farmers. Consumers have access to fresh food from an accountable source with an opportunity to reconnect with the land and influence the landscape they live in. CSA delivers environmental benefits of fewer food miles, less packaging and ecologically sensitive farming and sees the return of local distinctiveness and regional food production with higher employment, more local processing, local consumption and circulation of money in the community enhancing local economies

Studies on the biology of Nosema necatrix (Protozoa: Microsporida

Imperial Users onl

A review and evaluation of the Langley Research Center's Scientific and Technical Information Program: Results of phase 6: The technical report. A survey and analysis

Current practice and usage using selected technical reports; literature relative to the sequential, language, and presentation components of technical reports; and NASA technical report publications standards are discussed. The effctiveness of the technical report as a product for information dissemination is considered

Postal financial services, development and inclusion: Building on the past and looking to the future

Post offices, inherited from the Industrial Revolution, were monolithic telephone and postal administrations. They were intimately linked to the fabric of nations and made significant contributions to state finances. From the 1960s onwards, integrators, such as UPS and FEDEX, started offering end-to-end express services, thus challenging the postal monopoly in new high added value services. Gradually, the liberalization paradigm gained ground. Telecommunications and sometimes financial services were spun off from postal operations. More recently, new policies and priorities started to emerge especially on the development agenda where financial inclusion has become a top priority in the developing world. The question to be addressed is which role, if any, the posts play or could play in ensuring inclusion. Despite an exceptionally scarce research in the field, this paper provides an overview of how these shifts in paradigm have affected postal policy, the postal financial services regulatory framework, the status of the organizations delivering those services and the offerings themselves in developing as well as in developed countries. After a research review, including the regulatory dimension, the paper focuses on how postal financial services institutions in their legal framework have developed bringing to the fore a panorama of a dozen of promising transformations of financial postal services in developing countries

Spirituality and Hallucinogen Use: Results from a Pilot Study among College Students

Anthropologists have studied the use of hallucinogens as a spiritual tool by indigenous populations since the turn of the 20th century. However, literature is sparse in describing use by non-indigenous populations. Using a study population of students from a university in the Southwest United States, the current study investigated the spiritual development and meaning that college students place on their use of hallucinogenic substances. The spiritual framework developed by Love and Talbot (1999) and a transpersonal anthropological approach were used to guide the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant. Results indicated that participants used hallucinogens for both spiritual and recreational purposes with hallucinogen use playing an important role in their continued exploration of spirituality, which was an integral part of their lives. This pilot study could serve as a primer for future research on the role of hallucinogen use in the spiritual experiences of contemporary U.S. college students, and other non-indigenous Western populations

Women's experiences of planning home births in Scotland : birthing autonomy.

The general aim of this study was to provide an in-depth exploration of the experiences of a group of 30 women who planned home births. This was to expand on the small amount of qualitative research in the field and suggest avenues for further research. With this general aim, I analysed the women's experiences in relation to the contexts in which they planned home births in order to provide a useful account for the women in the study, those who may plan home births in the future, as well as clinicians, managers and policy-makers involved in maternity services. I considered some of the wider political, social and historical discourses, which underpin the present situation in Scotland regarding home births. While I acknowledged that these are unstable reference points, they were useful in gaining insights into the current situation. This was particularly the case when looking at home birth as part of a complex interplay between dominant and subordinate ideologies, which were partially played out through gender relations symbolised by the male doctor and the female midwife. A postmodern reading of feminisms provided the conceptual tools to examine diverse belief systems around birth in relation to women's narratives. Suspending "truth" enabled diverse knowledges to become more visible. This validated women's experiential knowledge which could then be placed alongside other knowledge systems, and examined in terms of dominant and marginalised ideologies. The project became one of conflicts and silences, searching out and listening to, and making visible "other" voices. This raised issues of power, control, autonomy and resistance. In most cases I interviewed each woman twice before her baby's birth and twice following the birth. Interviews were usually 1 Y2 to 2 hours in length, taped and transcribed. A qualitative software program, NUD*IST was used to assist with analysis, but the conceptual framework for the analysis remained rooted in a postmodern feminist approach using a relational voice methodology. The main findings were that National Health Service (NHS) community midwifery services were based on an attenuated technocratic model of birth. This imposed a philosophy and structure of care that prevented women and midwives from developing alternative ideologies based on their own knowledges. It prevented women and midwives from forming trusting, supportive relationships, which stand at the core of holistic philosophies of birth. Women and midwives were often obliged to draw on subversive techniques to use their knowledge and skills in order to make the best of a system which by definition could not be woman-centred or holistic. The main conclusion was that birth requires to be socialised rather than medicalised, so that technology and medical practices can be developed and used to support women and babies, and midwifery practices when necessary, rather than birth being technocratised and social practices used to humanise an essentially inhumane system of care

COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF ANTIOXIDANT POTENTIAL OF CASSIA AURICULATA (LINN.) FLOWER, LEAF AND SEED METHANOLIC EXTRACTS

Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the antioxidant potential of the methanolic extract of flowers, leaves and seeds of Cassia auriculata (Linn.) along with the quantification of total phenolics and flavonoids content.Methods: The antioxidant activity of flowers, leaves and seeds of Cassia auriculata (Linn.) was assessed with the help of various in vitro antioxidant assay systems as 2,2-Diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) scavenging assay, reducing power assay and Nitric oxide scavenging assay. For the determination of phenolic content the Folin Ciocalteu method and for flavonoids Aluminium Chloride spectrophotometric method was adopted.Results: The flowers, leaves and seeds methanolic extracts of Cassia auriculata (Linn.) were screened for different phyto chemicals present and the major antioxidants polyphenols and flavonoids were quantified. All the extracts showed significant antioxidant activity in all assays with the same trend as in total phenolics and flavonoids content. Flowers show most antioxidant activity in all assay systems due to higher phenolics and flavonoids content. That indicated the direct correlation among antioxidant potential, total phenolics and flavonoids content.Conclusion: The result implies that the Cassia auriculata (Linn.) plant parts especially flowers can be serving as natural sources of antioxidants and could be used in the treatment of diseases that have free-radical origin and as a substitute for synthetic drugs. Â

Orienting asymmetries in dogs’ responses to different communicatory components of human speech

It is well established that in human speech perception the left hemisphere (LH) of the brain is specialized for processing intelligible phonemic (segmental) content (e.g., [1–3]), whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive to pro- sodic (suprasegmental) cues [4, 5]. Despite evidence that a range of mammal species show LH specialization when pro- cessing conspecific vocalizations [6], the presence of hemi- spheric biases in domesticated animals’ responses to the communicative components of human speech has never been investigated. Human speech is familiar and relevant to domestic dogs (Canis familiaris), who are known to perceive both segmental phonemic cues [7–10] and supra- segmental speaker-related [11, 12] and emotional [13] proso- dic cues. Using the head-orienting paradigm, we presented dogs with manipulated speech and tones differing in segmental or suprasegmental content and recorded their orienting responses. We found that dogs showed a sig- nificant LH bias when presented with a familiar spoken command in which the salience of meaningful phonemic (segmental) cues was artificially increased but a significant RH bias in response to commands in which the salience of intonational or speaker-related (suprasegmental) vocal cues was increased. Our results provide insights into mech- anisms of interspecific vocal perception in a domesticated mammal and suggest that dogs may share ancestral or convergent hemispheric specializations for processing the different functional communicative components of speech with human listeners

Scoping Potential Routes to UK Civil Unrest via the Food System: Results of a Structured Expert Elicitation

We report the results of a structured expert elicitation to identify the most likely types of potential food system disruption scenarios for the UK, focusing on routes to civil unrest. We take a backcasting approach by defining as an end-point a societal event in which 1 in 2000 people have been injured in the UK, which 40% of experts rated as “Possible (20–50%)”, “More likely than not (50–80%)” or “Very likely (>80%)” over the coming decade. Over a timeframe of 50 years, this increased to 80% of experts. The experts considered two food system scenarios and ranked their plausibility of contributing to the given societal scenario. For a timescale of 10 years, the majority identified a food distribution problem as the most likely. Over a timescale of 50 years, the experts were more evenly split between the two scenarios, but over half thought the most likely route to civil unrest would be a lack of total food in the UK. However, the experts stressed that the various causes of food system disruption are interconnected and can create cascading risks, highlighting the importance of a systems approach. We encourage food system stakeholders to use these results in their risk planning and recommend future work to support prevention, preparedness, response and recovery planning

Patient-Specific Prosthetic Fingers by Remote Collaboration - A Case Study

The concealment of amputation through prosthesis usage can shield an amputee from social stigma and help improve the emotional healing process especially at the early stages of hand or finger loss. However, the traditional techniques in prosthesis fabrication defy this as the patients need numerous visits to the clinics for measurements, fitting and follow-ups. This paper presents a method for constructing a prosthetic finger through online collaboration with the designer. The main input from the amputee comes from the Computer Tomography (CT) data in the region of the affected and the non-affected fingers. These data are sent over the internet and the prosthesis is constructed using visualization, computer-aided design and manufacturing tools. The finished product is then shipped to the patient. A case study with a single patient having an amputated ring finger at the proximal interphalangeal joint shows that the proposed method has a potential to address the patient's psychosocial concerns and minimize the exposure of the finger loss to the public.Comment: Open Access articl