WHAT WE HEAR AND WHAT WE DO: An analysis of the perceptual influence of child spacing campaigns on the knowledge, attitude and practices of rural women in South-East Nigeria

This study examines the influence of child spacing campaigns on the knowledge, attitude and practices of South-East rural women. Using behavioural change theory as the framework, the study adopted survey method as its research design. A total of 384 respondents drawn from the South-East responded to the copies of the questionnaire designed from six research questions raised in the study. After a thorough analysis, it was found that while the mass media campaigns on child spacing have created serious awareness about child spacing in South-East rural communities, the practice is still very low. Some of the problems found to be associated with this low practice include lack of adequate community health facilitators, lack of information on improved child spacing techniques, urban oriented messages, lack of integration of the rural people in messages/communication meant for their consumption, etc. Based on these findings, it was recommended that, health workers, media researchers, communicators, social workers, guidance counselors and those in the helping profession should take cognizance of those variables that have been found to influence birth spacing practices among couples with the view to correcting them for an informed and healthy society. Keywords: Child spacing ●Campaign● Attitude ● Practices●  Rural wome

Dynamics and underlying causes of illegal bushmeat trade in Zimbabwe

The prevalence and impacts of the illegal trade in bushmeat are under appreciated in Southern Africa, despite indications that it constitutes a serious conservation threat in parts of the region. Bushmeat trade has emerged as a severe threat to wildlife conservation and the viability of wildlife-based land uses in Zimbabwe during a period of political instability and severe economic decline. We conducted a study around Save´ Valley Conservancy in the South-East Lowveld of Zimbabwe to investigate the dynamics and underlying causes of the bushmeat trade, with the objective of developing solutions. We found that bushmeat hunting is conducted mainly by unemployed young men to generate cash income, used mostly to purchase food. Bushmeat is mainly sold to people with cash incomes in adjacent communal lands and population centres and is popular by virtue of its affordability and availability. Key drivers of the bushmeat trade in the South-East Lowveld include: poverty, unemployment and food shortages, settlement of wildlife areas by impoverished communities that provided open access to wildlife resources, failure to provide stakes for communities in wildlife-based land uses, absence of affordable protein sources other than illegally sourced bushmeat, inadequate investment in anti-poaching in areas remaining under wildlife management, and weak penal systems that do not provide sufficient deterrents to illegal bushmeat hunters. Each of these underlying causes needs to be addressed for the bushmeat trade to be tackled effectively. However, in the absence of political and economic stability, controlling illegal bushmeat hunting will remain extremely difficult and the future of wildlife-based land uses will remain bleak.TRAFFIC East/Southern Africa, the European Union, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Wilderness Trust, Chicago Board of Trade, and the supporters of the African Wildlife Conservation Fund.http://journals.cambridge.orgab201

Ecological and financial impacts of illegal bushmeat trade in Zimbabwe

Under conditions of political instability and economic decline illegal bushmeat hunting has emerged as a serious conservation threat in Zimbabwe. Following settlement of game ranches by subsistence farming communities, wildlife populations have been eradicated over large areas. In several areas still being managed as game ranches illegal hunting is causing further declines of wildlife populations (including threatened species such as the wild dog Lycaon pictus and black rhinoceros Diceros bicornis), threatening the viability of wildlife-based land uses. From August 2001 to July 2009 in Save´ Valley Conservancy 10,520 illegal hunting incidents were recorded, 84,396 wire snares removed, 4,148 hunters caught, 2,126 hunting dogs eliminated and at least 6,454 wild animals killed. Estimated future financial losses from illegal hunting in the Conservancy exceed USD 1.1 million year-1. Illegal hunters’ earnings account for 0.31–0.52% of the financial losses that they impose and the bushmeat trade is an inefficient use of wildlife resources. Illegal hunting peaks during the late dry season and is more frequent close to the boundary, near areas resettled during land reform and close to water. Illegal hunting with dogs peaks during moonlight periods. Our study highlights several management and land-use planning steps required to maximize the efficacy of anti-poaching and to reduce the likelihood of high impacts of illegal hunting. Anti-poaching efforts should be aligned with the regular temporal and spatial patterns of illegal hunting. Leases for hunting and tourism concessions should ensure minimum adequate investment by operators in anti-poaching. Reserve designers should minimize the surface area to volume ratio of parks. Fences should not be constructed using wire that can be made into snares. Land reform involving game ranches should integrate communities in wildlife-based land uses and ensure spatial separation between land for wildlife and human settlement. Means are required to create stakeholdings for communities in wildlife and disincentives for illegal hunting.TRAFFIC Southern and East Africa, the European Union, Wilderness Trust, Chicago Board of Trade and the supporters of the African Wildlife Conservation Fund.http://journals.cambridge.orgab201

S-Brane Thermodynamics

The description of string-theoretic s-branes at g_s=0 as exact worldsheet CFTs with a (lambda cosh X^0) or (lambda e^(X^0)) boundary interaction is considered. Due to the imaginary-time periodicity of the interaction under X^0 -> X^0 + 2 pi i, these configurations have intriguing similarities to black hole or de Sitter geometries. For example, the open string pair production as seen by an Unruh detector is thermal at temperature T = 1/4 pi. It is shown that, despite the rapid time dependence of the s-brane, there exists an exactly thermal mixed state of open strings. The corresponding boundary state is constructed for both the bosonic and superstring cases. This state defines a long-distance Euclidean effective field theory whose light modes are confined to the s-brane. At the critical value of the coupling lambda=1/2, the boundary interaction simply generates an SU(2) rotation by pi from Neumman to Dirichlet boundary conditions. The lambda=1/2 s-brane reduces to an array of sD-branes (D-branes with a transverse time dimension) on the imaginary time axis. The long range force between a (bosonic) sD-brane and an ordinary D-brane is shown from the annulus diagram to be 11/12 times the force between two D-branes. The linearized time-dependent RR field F=dC produced by an sD-brane in superstring theory is explicitly computed and found to carry a half unit of s-charge Q_s=\int_S *F=1/2, where S is any transverse spacelike slice.Comment: 42 page

Charged AdS Black Holes and Catastrophic Holography

We compute the properties of a class of charged black holes in anti-de Sitter space-time, in diverse dimensions. These black holes are solutions of consistent Einstein-Maxwell truncations of gauged supergravities, which are shown to arise from the inclusion of rotation in the transverse space. We uncover rich thermodynamic phase structures for these systems, which display classic critical phenomena, including structures isomorphic to the van der Waals-Maxwell liquid-gas system. In that case, the phases are controlled by the universal `cusp' and `swallowtail' shapes familiar from catastrophe theory. All of the thermodynamics is consistent with field theory interpretations via holography, where the dual field theories can sometimes be found on the world volumes of coincident rotating branes.Comment: 19 pages, revtex, psfig, 6 multicomponent figures, typos, references and a few remarks have been repaired, and adde

Inflation, cold dark matter, and the central density problem

A problem with high central densities in dark halos has arisen in the context of LCDM cosmologies with scale-invariant initial power spectra. Although n=1 is often justified by appealing to the inflation scenario, inflationary models with mild deviations from scale-invariance are not uncommon and models with significant running of the spectral index are plausible. Even mild deviations from scale-invariance can be important because halo collapse times and densities depend on the relative amount of small-scale power. We choose several popular models of inflation and work out the ramifications for galaxy central densities. For each model, we calculate its COBE-normalized power spectrum and deduce the implied halo densities using a semi-analytic method calibrated against N-body simulations. We compare our predictions to a sample of dark matter-dominated galaxies using a non-parametric measure of the density. While standard n=1, LCDM halos are overdense by a factor of 6, several of our example inflation+CDM models predict halo densities well within the range preferred by observations. We also show how the presence of massive (0.5 eV) neutrinos may help to alleviate the central density problem even with n=1. We conclude that galaxy central densities may not be as problematic for the CDM paradigm as is sometimes assumed: rather than telling us something about the nature of the dark matter, galaxy rotation curves may be telling us something about inflation and/or neutrinos. An important test of this idea will be an eventual consensus on the value of sigma_8, the rms overdensity on the scale 8 h^-1 Mpc. Our successful models have values of sigma_8 approximately 0.75, which is within the range of recent determinations. Finally, models with n>1 (or sigma_8 > 1) are highly disfavored.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Minor changes made to reflect referee's Comments, error in Eq. (18) corrected, references updated and corrected, conclusions unchanged. Version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D, scheduled for 15 August 200

Benefits of wildlife-based land uses on private lands in Namibia and limitations affecting their development

Legislative changes during the 1960s–1970s granted user rights over wildlife to landowners in southern Africa, resulting in a shift from livestock farming to wildlifebased land uses. Few comprehensive assessments of such land uses on private land in southern Africa have been conducted and the associated benefits are not always acknowledged by politicians. Nonetheless, wildlife-based land uses are growing in prevalence on private land. In Namibia wildlife-based land use occurs over c. 287,000 km2. Employment is positively related to income from ecotourism and negatively related to income from livestock. While 87% of meat from livestock is exported $95% of venison from wildlife-based land uses remains within the country, contributing to food security. Wildlife populations are increasing with expansion of wildlife-based land uses, and private farms contain 21–33 times more wildlife than in protected areas. Because of the popularity of wildlife-based land uses among younger farmers, increasing tourist arrivals and projected impacts of climate change on livestock production, the economic output of wildlife-based land uses will probably soon exceed that of livestock. However, existing policies favour livestock production and are prejudiced against wildlife-based land uses by prohibiting reintroductions of buffalo Syncerus caffer, a key species for tourism and safari hunting, and through subsidies that artificially inflate the profitability of livestock production. Returns from wildlife-based land uses are also limited by the failure to reintroduce other charismatic species, failure to develop fully-integrated conservancies and to integrate black farmers sufficiently.TRAFFIC East/Southern Africa and Tom Milliken for instigating this project and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and African Wildlife Conservation Fund.http://journals.cambridge.orgam201

Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP

We measure cosmological parameters using the three-dimensional power spectrum P(k) from over 200,000 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in combination with WMAP and other data. Our results are consistent with a ``vanilla'' flat adiabatic Lambda-CDM model without tilt (n=1), running tilt, tensor modes or massive neutrinos. Adding SDSS information more than halves the WMAP-only error bars on some parameters, tightening 1 sigma constraints on the Hubble parameter from h~0.74+0.18-0.07 to h~0.70+0.04-0.03, on the matter density from Omega_m~0.25+/-0.10 to Omega_m~0.30+/-0.04 (1 sigma) and on neutrino masses from <11 eV to <0.6 eV (95%). SDSS helps even more when dropping prior assumptions about curvature, neutrinos, tensor modes and the equation of state. Our results are in substantial agreement with the joint analysis of WMAP and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which is an impressive consistency check with independent redshift survey data and analysis techniques. In this paper, we place particular emphasis on clarifying the physical origin of the constraints, i.e., what we do and do not know when using different data sets and prior assumptions. For instance, dropping the assumption that space is perfectly flat, the WMAP-only constraint on the measured age of the Universe tightens from t0~16.3+2.3-1.8 Gyr to t0~14.1+1.0-0.9 Gyr by adding SDSS and SN Ia data. Including tensors, running tilt, neutrino mass and equation of state in the list of free parameters, many constraints are still quite weak, but future cosmological measurements from SDSS and other sources should allow these to be substantially tightened.Comment: Minor revisions to match accepted PRD version. SDSS data and ppt figures available at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/sdsspars.htm

Monitoring dryland energy and water dynamics in India: an analysis of COSMOS-India and flux tower observations

Small changes in precipitation and temperature can dramatically influence surface energy and water budgets in semi-arid regions. Quantifying land-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks in these areas is crucial to understanding global water and carbon cycles, for the development and testing of land surface, weather prediction and climate models, as well as for monitoring local water resources and agricultural output. We report the results of co-located observations of land surface water and energy fluxes and large-area soil moisture dynamics obtained at three study sites located across India. These sites were instrumented as part of the INCOMPASS (INteraction of Convective Organisation with Monsoon Precipitation, Atmosphere, Surface and Sea) and COSMOS-India projects. Two sites are located on contrasting red (Alfisols) and black (Vertisols) soils on the Deccan Plateau. A third site is installed on alluvial soils (Fluvisols) on the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Each site consists of an eddy covariance flux tower providing measurements of sensible (H) and latent heat (LE) fluxes, micrometeorology and soil physics, in combination with a COSMOS (COsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System) sensor that provides spatially-integrated measurements of soil water content at field scale. In this presentation, we report on feedbacks between the land surface and the atmosphere, with a specific focus on the evaporative fraction (EF=LE/LE+H), precipitation and time varying soil moisture dynamics. CEH: Ross Morrison, Jonathan Evans, Chris Taylor, Lucy Ball, Alan Jenkins, Hollie Cooper, Jenna Thornton. IISc (Indian Institute of Science): Sekhar Muddu. University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad: S.S. Angadi. Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur: Sachi Tripathi, Mithun Krishnan, Geet George. University of Reading: Andrew G. Turner