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Multipurpose trees on farms can improve nutrition in Malawi
Full text linkAgricultural intensification can lead to simplified landscapes and simplified diets, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Trees on farms offer promising co-benefits for the environment and human health, with the potential to improve diets via providing food, income, and/or fuelwood. In this study, we measure how using trees on farms can support women’s diets in rural Malawi. We find that using trees on farms to source food is positively associated with women’s dietary quality in both dry and wet seasons. While we do not find any consistent additional benefits from using trees on farms for fuelwood or income, we find that multipurpose trees on farms—providing food, income, and fuel—can support diets while offering other livelihood benefits. This study therefore helps evidence multipurpose trees on farms as a viable pathway for addressing malnutrition in rural communities
What matters for 'good work'? Shared perspectives from Work Integration Social Enterprises
Full text linkWith the positive effects of 'good work', and the adverse effects of poor work becoming increasingly well documented, innovative approaches to providing employment for those who are excluded from work continues to be a salient topic. Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) are organizations that pursue employment creation for those often excluded from the wider labour market. Yet WISEs have faced criticism for prioritizing market-based approaches to addressing social problems, posing implications for good work. Since 'good work' is highly subjective we employ Q methodology to answer the question: What are the perspectives of workers in WISEs regarding what 'good work' means to them? The findings of our study indicate that three broad perspectives on good work emerge from workers within WISEs. The nuances of these perspectives could help to guide WISEs to balance the provision of good work alongside social and commercial tensions.Decent Work and Economic GrowthReduced Inequalitie
Perceived intrinsic 3D shape of faces is robust to changes in lighting direction, image rotation and polarity inversion
Full text linkFace recognition from 2D images is influenced by various factors, including lighting conditions, viewing direction, rotation, and polarity inversion. It has been proposed that these techniques affect face recognition by distorting shape from shading. This study investigates the perception of 3D face shape in 2D images using a gauge figure task. Two experiments were conducted where participants adjusted a gauge figure across multiple locations within a 3D image to assess its surface structure. We manipulated face orientation, lighting direction, and polarity inversion (exp 2). While these manipulations resulted in variations from the true surface structure, they could be explained by an affine transformation. This suggests that the perception of the intrinsic 3D shape of faces is stable across these image manipulation techniques. The effects of viewing conditions on face recognition may thus be better interpreted through their influence on the perception of material properties such as pigmentation, or on information closer to the level of the retinal image itself
Cross modality medical image synthesis for improving liver segmentation
Full text linkDeep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of medical images requires large datasets. However, the lack of large publicly available labelled datasets limits the development of deep learning-based CAD systems. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), in particular, CycleGAN, can be used to generate new cross-domain images without paired training data. However, most CycleGAN-based synthesis methods lack the potential to overcome alignment and asymmetry between the input and generated data. We propose a two-stage technique for the synthesis of abdominal MRI using cross-modality translation of abdominal CT. We show that the synthetic data can help improve the performance of the liver segmentation network. We increase the number of abdominal MRI images through cross-modality image transformation of unpaired CT images using a CycleGAN inspired deformation invariant network called EssNet. Subsequently, we combine the synthetic MRI images with the original MRI images and use them to improve the accuracy of the U-Net on a liver segmentation task. We train the U-Net on real MRI images and then on real and synthetic MRI images. Consequently, by comparing both scenarios, we achieve an improvement in the performance of U-Net. In summary, the improvement achieved in the Intersection over Union (IoU) is 1.17%. The results show the potential to address the data scarcity challenge in medical imaging
In Situ Vivianite Formation in Intertidal Sediments: Ferrihydrite-Adsorbed P Triggers Vivianite Formation
Full text linkCoastal sediments are a key contributor to oceanic phosphorus (P) removal, impacting P bioavailability and primary productivity. Vivianite, an Fe(II)-phosphate mineral, can be a major P sink in nonsulfidic, reducing coastal sediments. Despite its importance, vivianite formation processes in sediments remain poorly understood. Here, we applied a novel approach to detect and quantify in situ vivianite formation in three intertidal flats. We conducted 7-week long incubations of mesh-bags filled with sediments mixed with (1) 57Fe-ferrihydrite, (2) 57Fe-ferrihydrite with adsorbed phosphate, and (3) 57Fe-ferrihydrite with adsorbed phosphate and some vivianite (natural Fe isotope abundance), which could serve as crystal growth sites. Synthesizing the ferrihydrite from 57Fe (96.1%) enabled us to detect transformation products using 57Fe-Mössbauer spectroscopy. Vivianite formed only in treatments containing adsorbed phosphate and only at the two sites where vivianite formation was thermodynamically feasible based on porewater chemistry. These results demonstrate vivianite formation within weeks when locally favorable Fe:P ratios exist. Although vivianite comprised a minor fraction of Fe (up to15%), it represented a significant P pool (up to 72%), emphasizing its role in coastal P burial. Additionally, our results may apply to other environmental systems like limnic sediments
Changes and continuities in gambling careers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal qualitative study of regular sports bettors in Britain
Full text linkBackground To explore continuities and changes in gambling behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic and the factors that influenced these among a sample of regular sports bettors. Methods A longitudinal qualitative study using in-depth interviews. Sixteen sports bettors living in Britain took part in the first interviews in July-November 2020, and 13 in the follow-up interviews in March-September 2021. Results Individual patterns of gambling were episodic: it was common for gambling to increase during some periods of the pandemic and to decrease during others, reflecting the dynamic and (often) challenging circumstances which people were living through at the time. Changes and continuities in gambling during the pandemic were influenced by a range of factors which we have grouped into two main themes relating to ‘gambling and the sports landscape’ and ‘disruption to day-to-day life’. It was common for a constellation of factors to influence gambling behaviour rather than a single factor. These constellations of factors varied from person to person and at different times during the pandemic. Conclusions Findings of the present study are consistent with earlier literature examining gambling careers before the advent of COVID-19 showing that gambling trajectories are non-linear. Our research suggests that ‘typical’ patterns of gambling behaviour (e.g. being episodic), and the broader known risk and protective factors within individuals, families, communities and societies have been amplified during the pandemic. Findings highlight the adaptability of the gambling industry to continue to reach consumers through product offerings and marketing even in a period of unprecedented restrictions on supply, and show the potential resulting harms of these actions among gamblers at risk of experiencing gambling problems. Taken together, findings from this study provide important new insights relevant to discussions about gambling regulation, and support calls for multifaceted and comprehensive policy, regulatory, and treatment approaches, to minimise gambling-related harms.Good Health and Well-Bein
Statebuilding Beyond Western Interventions: Rising Powers, Emerging Modes of Institution-Building, and the Implications for Peace Studies
Full text linkOver the last three decades, statebuilding, or the process of building political institutions in conflict-affected states (CAS), as a part of a negotiated peace settlement, has been associated with peacebuilding interventions supported by Western states. Non-western rising powers, in turn, are seen to disengage from statebuilding given their ambivalence towards the liberal peacebuilding agenda, and support for the norm of sovereignty. Challenging this dominant narrative, this article examines how India and China have shaped political institutions central to the peace process, such as federalism and inclusion, in two CAS in their regional neighborhood, Nepal and Myanmar, despite not pledging to the international statebuilding agendas. It firstly argues that India and China have influenced the institutional design of political institutions in three ways: directly through coercive diplomacy and economic incentives, indirectly as CAS borrow from the domestic experience of India and China to design their political institutions, and unintendedly as a by-product of their large-scale infrastructures and investments, which alters the distributional consequences of the postwar institutions. Secondly, the article asserts that such institution-building experiences of non-Western states challenge three established scholarly canons in peace studies: role of coercion in peacebuilding by highlighting how illiberal and coercive modes of institution-building can foster liberal outcomes, the Eurocentricity or the “West” as the source of influence for institutional design by outlining how CAS increasingly look to the domestic institutional experiences of non-Western states to emulate, and need to broaden the scope of what constitutes institution-building to include physical infrastructures that significantly shape political institutions
Practical Routes to Preregistration: A Guide to Enhanced Transparency and Rigour in Neuropsychological Research
Full text linkPreregistration is the act of formally documenting a research plan before collecting (or at least before analysing) the data. It allows those reading a final research report to know which aspects of a study were decided before sight of the data, and which were added later. This enables informed evaluation of the severity with which scientific claims have been tested. We, as the British Neuropsychological Society Open Research Group, conducted a survey to explore awareness and adoption of open research practices within our field. Neuropsychology involves the study of relatively rare or hard-to-access participants, creating practical challenges that, according to our survey, are perceived as barriers to preregistration. We survey the available routes to preregistration, and suggest that the barriers are all surmountable in one way or another. However, there is a tension, in that higher levels of bias control require greater restriction over the flexibility of preregistered studies, but such flexibility is often essential for neuropsychological research. Researchers must therefore consider which route provides the right balance of rigour and pragmatic flexibility to render a preregistered project viable for them. By mapping out the issues and potential solutions, and by signposting relevant resources and publication routes, we hope to facilitate well-reasoned decision-making and empower neuropsychologists to enhance the transparency and rigour of their research. Although we focus neuropsychology, our guidance is applicable to any field that studies hard-to-access human samples, or involves arduous or expensive means of data collection
Do chimpanzees produce context-specific vocal structures in group-specific ways?
Full text linkLearning how to link a signal to its appropriate behavioural context in a flexible and meaningful way is foundational to human language, but there is little evidence of this capacity in nonhuman primates. We addressed this by studying chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, pant hoot contextual use in two communities, Sonso and Kanyawara, from two different wild populations in Uganda. Pant hoots are complex, composite vocal signals, comprising four acoustically distinct phases and produced in different contexts, mostly during travelling and feeding to mediate grouping dynamics. We measured 18 acoustic parameters across phase types and found significant effects of context in all four phases, confirming that pant hoots have the potential to inform others about the caller’s behaviour. We also found two interaction effects between context and community in the final let-down phase: Sonso males produced let-down call elements at higher rates during feeding than travelling and were also more likely to omit the let-down phase entirely during feeding than travelling, than Kanyawara males. We concluded that despite their largely fixed call repertoire, chimpanzees modulate acoustic features according to the behavioural context and, in the case of a few acoustic parameters, do so differently in different populations, with learning potentially involved in this process. Overall, however, the link between most of the acoustic features of chimpanzee calls and context seems to be largely independent of population, which contrasts with human language where different and novel signals are often flexibly attached to different information via social learning
The Antarctic Ice Sheet and sea level: contemporary changes and future projections
Full text linkAntarctica holds Earth’s largest ice sheet, which is slowly shrinking in response to climate warming. Over the coming decades to centuries, the loss of ice will likely continue and accelerate, potentially contributing several metres to global sea level rise. How fast and how much the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) will continue to shrink is subject to “deep uncertainty”, which includes how rapid deglaciation can be triggered by feedback related to fracturing processes and vulnerabilities with regions grounded below sea level. In this chapter, we review our understanding of the key processes and potential feedback that can accelerate AIS retreat, and summarise its recent changes. We discuss future projections and what is understood by deep uncertainty in this context and then examine the consequences of AIS loss on global and regional sea level change. We close with a brief discussion of future research directions that will reduce gaps in our understanding of key ice-sheet processes and how these processes contribute to ice-sheet evolution, risks of rapid ice loss and implications for the research and planning needed to adapt to a changing sea level and climate
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