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Effects of Fish Cage Aquaculture on Water Quality in Lake Victoria, Kenya.
No full textAquaculture is one of the practices that is projected to contribute to food security and the realization of UNDP SDG 2: Zero Hunger, by 2030. However, developing countries of which Kenya is no exception, are faced with the challenge of the impact of aquaculture practices on the environment (FAO, 2006). High amount of discharges which include waste food and faeces, nutrients, and in some instances medication and pesticide residues are released from cage farms. The impact of these effluents on the receiving environment depend largely on the quantity of waste discharged, the time period at which the discharge takes place, the ability of the environment to absorb the discharges and the rate at which the receiving water body is able to flush the effluent
Neither Sustainable Nor Inclusive: A Political Economy Of Agricultural Policy And Livelihoods In Malawi, Tanzania And Zambia
No full textThe food crisis of 2007/8, alongside rapid population growth, and the uncertainties of climate change propelled African agricultural transformation back into the development mainstream. New narratives of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ and ‘sustainable intensification’ underlie this contemporary transformation. We present a political economy analysis of agricultural policy and livelihoods in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, and use this to assess the challenge of achieving ‘sustainable and inclusive intensification’. We find little evidence that agricultural institutions have the capacity to deliver sustainable intensification in agriculture, or that agricultural policy drives changes in agricultural livelihoods that will make them either more sustainable or inclusive
Using Models to Capture Patterns for Radically Increasing Social Impact
No full textGeneral Collective Intelligence is an emerging science that creates the possibility of exponentially increasing our general problem-solving ability and therefore our ability to solve any problem in general. This translates into significantly increasing social impact. One way of achieving this is defining patterns through which projects might be combined into networks of cooperation that increase impact on collectively targeted goals. In the case of the sustainable development goals, there are three patterns that together can be demonstrated to represent an exponentially greater number of potential solutions than currently available, and which can be demonstrated to have the potential for this exponentially greater impact. All of these patterns can be represented through domain specific models. This paper explores those models and how they might be leveraged to achieve this radically increased social impact
Leveraging General Collective Intelligence to Increase the Impact of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Algorithms
No full textThe emerging science of General Collective Intelligence or GCI describes how GCI as a hypothetical cognitive computing platform might enable groups of individuals or intelligent agents working on behalf of those individuals to self-assemble into a massive network of cooperation. Such networks are predicted to be able to radically increase the speed and scale at which the group might construct platforms from a library of logic based functionality (i.e. procedural program) and/or a library of text pattern recognition based functionality (i.e. machine intelligence algorithms), as well as enable groups to do so on a self-sustaining basis, where these self-assembled platforms are also predicted to achieve significantly better outcomes for the group of users. To facilitate this self-assembly, GCI leverages Human-Centric Functional Modeling to represent such components in terms of paths through a functional state space defined to represent all possible behavior of this cognitive computing platform so that all such components can be represented. This article explores how this same approach might be applied to define cognitive visual processing platforms that radically increase capacity to leverage all existing image processing functionality as well as all visual pattern recognition algorithms in order to radically increase capacity for and effectiveness at image recognition
Tense And Aspect In Akan Serial Verb Constructions
No full textIn Akan, tense and aspect in serial verb constructions have different distributions. Tense is repeated on all the verbs; aspect only appears on the first verb, the following verbs have the à marker. In this paper, I argue that this difference in distribution is a consequence of being evaluated by different syntactic mechanisms. Evaluation of unvalued features is licensed by two syntactic mechanisms, Agree and Selection/Sel(ect)-Merge. In Akan, tense is evaluated by Agree and aspect by Selection. The -à morpheme that appears on the non-initial verbs in these clauses is the phonological realization of the morphosyntactic feature bundle [−prog, −fut]. Tense morphology depicts T-v Agree. The same tense inflection on all the verbs appears on verbs because one T-head parallel-Agrees with all of them. Since a single T-head cannot have different interpretations, it results in the matching restriction
Psychology should generalize from—not just to— Africa
Get PDFWhen psychologists attend to Africa, they usually test whether theories and concepts developed in North America and Europe generalize to Africa. Psychology would be enriched by focusing on Africa on its own terms
Sorting out Proto-Bantu *j
Get PDFThe most problematic of the consonants that Meeussen reconstructed for
Proto-Bantu (PB) phonology is *j, for which Guthrie used both *j and *y. Earlier generations had also sometimes omitted either in favour of vowel-initial roots. Recent progress in establishing a solid family tree of the Bantu languages allows the evidence to be re-evaluated based on phylogenetic significance, especially with the help of more data from the North-Western Bantu branches. It has long been recognised that Meeussen’s *j has various outcomes throughout the Bantu area based on phonological or morphological environments. The primary method of this chapter is to sort out the evidence for PB *j into different phonological and morphological environments, and then consider possible scenarios for reconstruction of those categories. In most roots with initial *j, there is no support for a PB stop and an initial vowel or glide should be reconstructed. That includes common verbs like *(y)àd ‘spread’ and *(y)ʊ́m ‘be dry’, and nouns like *ícò ‘eye’ or *ʊ́bà ‘sun’. Most modern reflexes in /z/ or /j/ are the result of developments at morpheme boundaries after the PB stage. Both *ny and *nj/nz are reconstructed as distinct phonemes
On a variant of Brocard's problem via the diagonalization method : Brocard's problem
Get PDFIn this paper we introduce and develop the method of diagonalization of functions f : N −→ R.
#find the complete abstract in the attached fil
Revisiting Drug Resistance Mechanisms Of A Notorious Nosocomial Pathogen: Acinetobacter Baumannii
Get PDFMini review on mechanisms and strategies expressed by A. baumannii to resist biological compounds with antagonistic activity on their growth. Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) has a propensity to develop, acquire and transmit antibiotic resistance-associated genes. This ability has enabled the proliferation of the species in harsh living conditions like the hospital environment. It is well known that a quasi-permanent contact between the bacterium and antibiotics has contributed to the improvement of expressed resistance mechanisms, but also, literature highlights the natural living conditions in which survival strategies have led the species to develop mechanisms and systems to establish their niche, sometimes in very competitive environment. All these mechanisms and strategies which are expressed, sometimes in response to antibiotics exposure or to just sustain viability, have enabled the rise of this bacteria species as a successful nosocomial pathogen. Here we review drug resistance mechanisms and strategies for environmental survival employed by this bacterium to consolidate information relevant for the current search for alternative management of infections caused by A. baumannii
Modeling Biological Systems Using Functional State Spaces
No full textThe technique of Human-Centric Functional Modeling represents systems as having a set of functions through which the system might transition from one state to another. These are functional states in that each state is described in terms of the functions available to transition to adjacent states. All possible behaviors of the system are then described by a graph containing a network of nodes representing such functional states, where those nodes are connected by edges representing the processes through which those functional states transition between each other. This paper outlines a hypothesis regarding how biological systems might come to occupy such a graph, also called a functional state space, and outlines some questions that must be answered in order to validate this hypothesis