Helping ourselves: the role of self-help groups in poverty alleviation through aquaculture

Self-help groups (SHGs) are ways for farmers and fishers, especially those who are poor, to come together and work together. They can be a useful entry point for outsiders, promote a supportive local environment, strengthen voices in decision-making and in negotiations with more powerful forces, increase the effectiveness of local actions, and provide easier access to micro-credit and other resources and services. This case study describes a rural aquaculture development context, in India, the development of SHGs and the concept of a ‘one-stop aqua shop’, set up and run by a federation of self-help groups in Kaipara village, West Bengal (a pilot state along with Jharkhand and Orissa). It outlines testing new ways to share information, as part of a series of revised procedures and institutional arrangements for service delivery recommended by farmers and fishers and prioritized by government, with support from the Department of International Development, London (DFID) Natural Resources Support Programme (NRSP) and the Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia-Pacific (NACA) to the Support to Regional Aquatic Resources Management (STREAM) Initiative (10 p.)

The Kaipara story: a closer look at the benefits of working together, the evolution of a federation of aquaculture self-help groups and a one-stop aqua shop in rural West Bengal

What is special about Kaipara is that most recently, they have founded a federation of Self-Help Groups that work together to develop their own support network and to draw in the support of others. This is a sophisticated ‘home-grown’ support infrastructure that is the subject of this story. (Pdf contains 8 pages).

Self-Help Groups

“‘Self-Help Groups’ are … “... A way to start working that helps to build up the social connections which people find useful in support of their livelihoods objectives” “... Helping people to agree things and to speak together, giving people a stronger voice in decision-making and in negotiating with more powerful forces” “... A way of increasing the effectiveness of local actions” “... Providing easier access to micro-credit and other resources and services” (Pdf contains 4 pages).

Does training policy help to attract, retain and develop valuable human resources? Analysis from the Mondragon case

This is an electronic version of the accepted paper in the journal:Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms. Volumen. 12

Relating thermodynamics to information theory : the equality of free energy and mutual information

In this thesis we uncover a new relation which links thermodynamics and information theory. We consider time as a channel and the detailed state of a physical system as a message. As the system evolves with time, ever present noise insures that the "message" is corrupted. Thermodynamic free energy measures the approach of the system toward equilibrium. Information theoretical mutual information measures the loss of memory of initial state. We regard the free energy and the mutual information as operators which map probability distributions over state space to real numbers. In the limit of long times, we show how the free energy operator and the mutual information operator asymptotically attain a very simple relationship to one another. This relationship is founded on the common appearance of entropy in the two operators and on an identity between internal energy and conditional entropy. The use of conditional entropy is what distinguishes our approach from previous efforts to relate thermodynamics and information theory.

Limited resources? Let the habitat priority planner help!

In this time of scarce resources, coastal resource managers must find ways to prioritize conservation, land use, and restoration efforts. The Habitat Priority Planner (HPP) is a free geospatial tool created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Services Center that has received wide praise for its ease of use and broad applicability to conservation strategic planning, restoration, climate change scenarios, and other natural resource management actions. Not a geographic information system (GIS) user? Don’t worry―this tool was designed to be used in a team setting. One intermediate-level GIS user can push the buttons to show quick results while a roomful of resource managers and stakeholders provide input criteria that determine the results. The Habitat Priority Planner is a toolbar for ESRI’s ArcGIS platform that is composed of three modules: Habitat Classification, Habitat Analysis, and Data Explorer. The tool calculates basic ecological statistics that are used to examine how habitats function within a landscape. The tool pre‐packages several common landscape metrics into a user‐friendly interface for intermediate GIS users. In addition, HPP allows the user to build queries interactively using a graphical interface for demonstrating criteria selections quickly in a visual manner that is useful in stakeholder interactions. Tool advocates and users include land trusts, conservation alliances, nonprofit organizations, and select National Estuarine Research Reserves and refuges of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Participants in this session will learn the basic requirements for HPP use and the multiple ways the HPP has been applied to geographies nationwide. (PDF contains 5 pages)

The global human security index: Can disaggregations help us to forge progress?

A Human Security Index (HIS) enumerating 200 countries was introduced in 2008. A community-level HSI is under development in the USA. Coastal communities face large disparities in components of human security. How can a HSI support improved policies/services (such as environmental or public health forecasts or warnings) for improving lives? Several issues are discussed. (PDF contains 4 pages)

Toward Understanding Astrophysical Phenomena

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), a novel type of radio pulse, whose physics is not yet understood at all. Only a handful of FRBs had been detected when we started this project. Taking account of the scant observations, we put physical constraints on FRBs. We excluded proposals of a galactic origin for their extraordinarily high dispersion measures (DM), in particular stellar coronas and HII regions. Therefore our work supports an extragalactic origin for FRBs. We show that the resolved scattering tail of FRB 110220 is unlikely to be due to propagation through the intergalactic plasma. Instead the scattering is probably caused by the interstellar medium in the FRB's host galaxy, and indicates that this burst sits in the central region of that galaxy. Pulse durations of order $\ms$ constrain source sizes of FRBs implying enormous brightness temperatures and thus coherent emission. Electric fields near FRBs at cosmological distances would be so strong that they could accelerate free electrons from rest to relativistic energies in a single wave period. When we worked on FRBs, it was unclear whether they were genuine astronomical signals as distinct from `perytons', clearly terrestrial radio bursts, sharing some common properties with FRBs. Recently, in April 2015, astronomers discovered that perytons were emitted by microwave ovens. Radio chirps similar to FRBs were emitted when their doors opened while they were still heating. Evidence for the astronomical nature of FRBs has strengthened since our paper was published. Some bursts have been found to show linear and circular polarizations and Faraday rotation of the linear polarization has also been detected. I hope to resume working on FRBs in the near future. But after we completed our FRB paper, I decided to pause this project because of the lack of observational constraints.

The pulsar triple system, J0733+1715, has its orbital parameters fitted to high accuracy owing to the precise timing of the central $\ms$ pulsar. The two orbits are highly hierarchical, namely $P_{\mathrm{orb,1}}\ll P_{\mathrm{orb,2}}$, where 1 and 2 label the inner and outer white dwarf (WD) companions respectively. Moreover, their orbital planes almost coincide, providing a unique opportunity to study secular interaction associated purely with eccentricity beyond the solar system. Secular interaction only involves effect averaged over many orbits. Thus each companion can be represented by an elliptical wire with its mass distributed inversely proportional to its local orbital speed. Generally there exists a mutual torque, which vanishes only when their apsidal lines are parallel or anti-parallel. To maintain either mode, the eccentricity ratio, $e_1/e_2$, must be of the proper value, so that both apsidal lines precess together. For J0733+1715, $e_1\ll e_2$ for the parallel mode, while $e_1\gg e_2$ for the anti-parallel one. We show that the former precesses $\sim 10$ times slower than the latter. Currently the system is dominated by the parallel mode. Although only a little anti-parallel mode survives, both eccentricities especially $e_1$ oscillate on $\sim 10^3\yr$ timescale. Detectable changes would occur within $\sim 1\yr$. We demonstrate that the anti-parallel mode gets damped $\sim 10^4$ times faster than its parallel brother by any dissipative process diminishing $e_1$. If it is the tidal damping in the inner WD, we proceed to estimate its tidal quantity parameter ($Q$) to be $\sim 10^6$, which was poorly constrained by observations. However, tidal damping may also happen during the preceding low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) phase or hydrogen thermal nuclear flashes. But, in both cases, the inner companion fills its Roche lobe and probably suffers mass/angular momentum loss, which might cause $e_1$ to grow rather than decay.

Several pairs of solar system satellites occupy mean motion resonances (MMRs). We divide these into two groups according to their proximity to exact resonance. Proximity is measured by the existence of a separatrix in phase space. MMRs between Io-Europa, Europa-Ganymede and Enceladus-Dione are too distant from exact resonance for a separatrix to appear. A separatrix is present only in the phase spaces of the Mimas-Tethys and Titan-Hyperion MMRs and their resonant arguments are the only ones to exhibit substantial librations. When a separatrix is present, tidal damping of eccentricity or inclination excites overstable librations that can lead to passage through resonance on the damping timescale. However, after investigation, we conclude that the librations in the Mimas-Tethys and Titan-Hyperion MMRs are fossils and do not result from overstability.

Rubble piles are common in the solar system. Monolithic elements touch their neighbors in small localized areas. Voids occupy a significant fraction of the volume. In a fluid-free environment, heat cannot conduct through voids; only radiation can transfer energy across them. We model the effective thermal conductivity of a rubble pile and show that it is proportional the square root of the pressure, $P$, for $P\leq \epsy^3\mu$ where $\epsy$ is the material's yield strain and $\mu$ its shear modulus. Our model provides an excellent fit to the depth dependence of the thermal conductivity in the top $140\,\mathrm{cm}$ of the lunar regolith. It also offers an explanation for the low thermal inertias of rocky asteroids and icy satellites. Lastly, we discuss how rubble piles slow down the cooling of small bodies such as asteroids.

Electromagnetic (EM) follow-up observations of gravitational wave (GW) events will help shed light on the nature of the sources, and more can be learned if the EM follow-ups can start as soon as the GW event becomes observable. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient time-domain algorithm capable of detecting gravitational waves (GWs) from coalescing binaries of compact objects with nearly zero time delay. In case when the signal is strong enough, our algorithm also has the flexibility to trigger EM observation {\it before} the merger. The key to the efficiency of our algorithm arises from the use of chains of so-called Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters, which filter time-series data recursively. Computational cost is further reduced by a template interpolation technique that requires filtering to be done only for a much coarser template bank than otherwise required to sufficiently recover optimal signal-to-noise ratio. Towards future detectors with sensitivity extending to lower frequencies, our algorithm's computational cost is shown to increase rather insignificantly compared to the conventional time-domain correlation method. Moreover, at latencies of less than hundreds to thousands of seconds, this method is expected to be computationally more efficient than the straightforward frequency-domain method.

A study of the nutrition of the Rotifer Asplanchna, with the help of Carbon 14 [Translation from: Byulleten ' Instituta Biologii Vodokhranilishch, No. 12, pp.17-20, 1962]

Laboratory research was done in order to study the feeding of larval Cricotopus silvestris F. in relation to characters of structure of oral apparatus. Results of the experiments are summarised and the oral apparatus morhologically described.

O turismo solidário e a redescrição social no Vale do Jequitinhonha-MG

Esta tese estuda o processo da implantação do Programa de Turismo Solidário pelo governo de Minas Gerais no Vale do Jequitinhonha - MG, bem como as características e os significados que o mesmo adquiriu, tanto junto aos moradores das localidades alvo quanto junto aos chamados turistas solidários, e avalia o estado da arte de modos de turismo semelhantes ao que ocorre no Vale, com ênfase em alguns casos nas favelas cariocas. A tese focaliza a apropriação pela população das diretrizes e dos aspectos teórico-metodológicos da proposta desse Programa; a percepção dos moradores em relação ao turismo que ali ocorre; o enquadramento em que os encontros no turismo solidário ocorrem; os significados do turismo solidário; os indicadores do turismo solidário. Traz, de um lado, uma visão abrangente, discutindo questões relacionadas às políticas públicas no campo do turismo, e de outro lado, uma abordagem de caráter etnográfico, relativa ao encontro intersubjetivo entre ―turistas solidários‖ e a população local. A construção da linha argumentativa da tese fundamenta-se nos seguintes pressupostos: as propostas de descentralização por meio da ideia de governança apresentadas pelas políticas públicas que sustentam a ideologia do Programa de Turismo Solidário são ferramentas importantes para o desenvolvimento local; o encontro entre pessoas com diferentes formas de vida, com reconhecimento recíproco entre si, suscita em ambas as partes um alargamento da percepção de mundo e uma possibilidade para redescrição dos sujeitos; o enquadramento em que a interação ocorre e o nível de intimidade entre os participantes influenciam na possibilidade do individuo repensar valores e atitudes. O documentário ―Retrato Brasil‖ filmado durante as pesquisas de campo, foi elaborado na perspectiva de auxiliar na promoção do que é chamado de turismo solidário, entre outras possibilidades.

As relações entre as medidas de habilidades sociais do professor do ensino fundamental II e seu desempenho social em sala de aula

O conceito atual de um comportamento socialmente habilidoso deve incluir capacidade de o indivíduo obter satisfação pessoal e, ao mesmo tempo, de desenvolver e manter relacionamentos mutuamente benéficos e sustentadores. No âmbito da educação, identifica-se uma crescente preocupação de pais, diretores de escolas e professores com o desenvolvimento interpessoal dos alunos, com o propósito de reduzir conflitos, aumentar a qualidade das relações entre os alunos e facilitar a aprendizagem. Neste sentido, é necessário que o professor se dedique a desenvolver as próprias habilidades interpessoais para que seja capaz de facilitar o desenvolvimento social e intelectual do aluno. Diante dessas constatações, torna-se relevante identificar que habilidades sociais do professor estão mais relacionadas com o seu desempenho social em sala de aula. Tais constatações fundamentaram esse estudo que avaliou os níveis de habilidades sociais de professores, assim como o desempenho social destes em sala de aula. Participaram da pesquisa oito professoras e dois professores do Ensino Fundamental II (do 6 ao 9 Ano), do Instituto Nossa Senhora Auxiliadora, no Rio de Janeiro. Suas idades variavam entre 24 e 50 anos. Participaram também 198 adolescentes, 100 do sexo masculino e 98 do sexo feminino. Suas idades variavam entre 11 e 15 anos. O desempenho social dos professores em sala de aula foi avaliado pelos próprios professores e pelos alunos, através do Questionário do Desempenho Social do Professor (QDSP). Os professores também responderam ao Inventário de Habilidades Sociais (IHS) e ao Inventário de Empatia (IE). Os resultados das medidas de auto-relato apontaram níveis de assertividade e de empatia acima da média na maioria dos professores dessa amostra, especialmente nos fatores relacionados a: auto-afirmação com risco; conversação e desenvoltura social; auto-exposição a desconhecidos e a situações novas; autocontrole da agressividade; tomada de perspectiva; flexibilidade; altruísmo e sensibilidade afetiva. As medidas de desempenho social dos professores foram satisfatórias, tanto a partir da perspectiva do professor quanto dos alunos. Entretanto, a auto-avaliação dos professores mostraram-se mais favoráveis do que a avaliação feita pelos alunos. Além disso, com base na avaliação dos alunos, apenas quatro professores apresentaram desempenho social assertivo e empático de forma equilibrada. Tais resultados indicam a necessidade de se desenvolver programas de treinamento em habilidades sociais educativas.