Integrating biodiversity and conservation with modern agricultural landscapes

To achieve food security and meet the demands of the ever-growing human populations, farming systems have assumed unsustainable practices to produce more from a finite land area. This has been cause for concern mainly due to the often-irreversible damage done to the otherwise productive agricultural landscapes. Agro-ecology is proclaimed to be deteriorating due to eroding integrity of connected ecological mosaics and vulnerability to climate change. This has contributed to declining species diversity, loss of buffer vegetation, fragmentation of habitats, and loss of natural pollinators or predators, which eventually leads to decline in ecosystem services. Currently, a hierarchy of conservation initiatives is being considered to restore ecological integrity of agricultural landscapes. However, the challenge of identifying a suitable conservation strategy is a daunting task in view of socio-ecological factors that may constrain the choice of available strategies. One way to mitigate this situation and integrate biodiversity with agricultural landscapes is to implement offset mechanisms, which are compensatory and balancing approaches to restore the ecological health and function of an ecosystem. This needs to be tailored to the history of location specific agricultural practices, and the social, ecological and environmental conditions. The offset mechanisms can complement other initiatives through which farmers are insured against landscape-level risks such as droughts, fire and floods. For countries in the developing world with significant biodiversity and extensive agriculture, we should promote a comprehensive model of sustainable agricultural landscapes and ecosystem services, replicable at landscape to regional scales. Arguably, the model can be a potential option to sustain the integrity of biodiversity mosaic in agricultural landscapes.

Impacts of modern transitions on thermal comfort in vernacular dwellings in warm-humid climate of Sugganahalli (India)

Sugganahalli, a rural vernacular community in a warm-humid region in South India, is under transition towards adopting modern construction practices. Vernacular local building elements like rubble walls and mud roofs are given way to burnt brick walls and reinforced cement concrete (RCC)/tin roofs. Over 60% of Indian population is rural, and implications of such transitions on thermal comfort and energy in buildings are crucial to understand. Vernacular architecture evolves adopting local resources in response to the local climate adopting passive solar designs. This paper investigates the effectiveness of passive solar elements on the indoor thermal comfort by adopting modern climate-responsive design strategies. Dynamic simulation models validated by measured data have also been adopted to determine the impact of the transition from vernacular to modern material-configurations. Age-old traditional design considerations were found to concur with modern understanding into bio-climatic response and climate-responsiveness. Modern transitions were found to increase the average indoor temperatures in excess of 7 degrees C. Such transformations tend to shift the indoor conditions to a psychrometric zone that is likely to require active air-conditioning. Also, the surveyed thermal sensation votes were found to lie outside the extended thermal comfort boundary for hot developing countries provided by Givoni in the bio-climatic chart.

Graph Modification Problems: A Modern Perspective

We give an overview of recent results and techniques in parameterized algorithms for graph modification problems.

Racionalidad de la filosofía política

Resumen: Se plantea, en primer lugar, el estado de la cuestión de la índole de la Filosofía Política como filosofía práctica, desde sus inicios en la tradición clásica griega hasta la actualidad. En el pensamiento griego se destaca Aristóteles con la justificación del ejercicio de la racionalidad práctica en los asuntos políticos. En la modernidad la filosofía práctica sale de escena, privándosela de legitimidad epistemológica. Por último, se valora una interesante propuesta en el pensamiento alemán del siglo XX por rehabilitar la filosofía práctica en clave aristotélica. Frente al estado de la cuestión se retoma a Aristóteles desde la lectura tomasiana de lo político y de la Filosofía Política. Su propósito ha sido el de salvar la verdad y la certeza de la Filosofía Política, la posibilidad de juicios de verdad y falsedad en el orden moral y político y, en especial, afirmar su validez normativa como saber filosófico, analizando la comunidad política en esa posibilidad de ser considerada como objeto-científico- filosófico-práctico-moral.

De la lírica medieval a la moderna : tradicionalidad e individualidad en la poesía española

Integran este número de la revista ponencias presentadas en Studia Hispanica Medievalia VIII : Actas de las X Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Española Medieval, 2011, y de Homenaje al Quinto Centenario del Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo.

Hegel y la disolución de la tradición de la ley natural : el apogeo del gnosticismo moderno

Resumen: En el presente trabajo, el autor expone la disolución teórica de la doctrina tradicional sobre la ley natural y su expulsión, incluso semántica, de la Filosofía del Derecho de Hegel. Para ello, se expone una síntesis del pensamiento especulativo de Hegel y se pone de manifiesto el inmanentismo radical del filósofo suabo, que resulta ser expresión del gnosticismo moderno.

Del sueño cartesiano a la muerte encefálica

Resumen: Entre el sueño y la muerte hay “sólo una distancia”. El dormir encierra un misterio que se aviva con los sueños y, al parecer, habrían prefigurado al mismo método científico moderno. Descartes pensó que en sus sueños se transmitía el espíritu de la verdad. El alma soñadora e inmortal adquirió notoriedad en su dualismo, al tiempo que dejó de asociársela con la muerte. Tres siglos después, la medicina permitió identificar individuos que estaban muertos, aunque pareciesen dormidos (coma dépassé). Así reapareció la asociación sueño-muerte, pero ahora con médicos provistos del “diagnóstico anátomo-clínico” que, por su herencia cartesiana, demandará evidencias. La duda metódica integrada al pensamiento científico, aportaría incertidumbre a las formulaciones cerebrales de la muerte. Este trabajo repasa el valor de los sueños para el pensamiento occidental, busca al “hombre-máquina” dentro de los criterios neurológicos del fallecido y, con la ayuda de la Filosofía, intenta comprender algunas objeciones en torno a la licitud del diagnóstico de “muerte encefálica”. Se propone una revisión sucinta de la obra del filósofo francés y su reflejo en aspectos del debate ofrecido por la literatura médica.

Profit and Cost in "Modern" Post-Marxian Profit Theory: A Case Study from Varian's "Intermediate Microeconomics"

In this paper, I examine the treatment of competitive profit of professor Varian in his textbook on Microeconomics, as a representative of the “modern” post-Marxian view on competitive profit. I show how, on the one hand, Varian defines profit as the surplus of revenues over cost and, thus, as a part of the value of commodities that is not any cost. On the other hand, however, Varian defines profit as a cost, namely, as the opportunity cost of capital, so that, in competitive conditions, the profit or income of capital is determined by the opportunity cost of capital. I argue that this second definition contradicts the first and that it is based on an incoherent conception of opportunity cost.

Guided pollards in the Basque Country (Spain) during the Early Modern Ages

Publicado en: "End of Tradition?.Part 1 : History of Commons and Commons Management (Cultural Severance and Commons Past)", edited by Ian D. Rotherham, Mauro Agnoletti and Christine Handley

Análisis de las publicaciones del personal docente e investigador de las facultades españolas de Bellas Artes

8 p.

Modern aquaculture practices for increased fish production in Nigeria

Various modern aquaculture practices applied in fish production especially in Asia are reviewed. The vast Nigerian aquatic medium of numerous water bodies like rivers, streams, lakes reservoirs, flood plains, irrigation canals, coastal swamps offer great potentials for aquaculture production, if optimally utilized. Constraints to modernization of aquaculture in Nigeria among other factors are: 1) a serious shortage of trained manpower; 2) lack of knowledge on profitability of aquaculture as an industry; 3) limited availability of fund (or capital); 4) non-recognition of indigenous trained aquaculture personnel; 5) inadequate data base on the biology and ecological requirements of endemic fish species with aquaculture potentials; 6) insufficient data on production and management techniques; and 7) lack of rational aquaculture development planning. Recommendations are made towards combating these constraints

Exploiting seismic waveforms of ambient noise and earthquakes

In this thesis, I apply detailed waveform modeling to study noise correlations in different environments, and earthquake waveforms for source parameters and velocity structure.

Green's functions from ambient noise correlations have primarily been used for travel-time measurement. In Part I of this thesis, by detailed waveform modeling of noise correlation functions, I retrieve both surface waves and crustal body waves from noise, and use them in improving earthquake centroid locations and regional crustal structures. I also present examples in which the noise correlations do not yield Green's functions, yet the results are still interesting and useful after case-by-case analyses, including non-uniform distribution of noise sources, spurious velocity changes, and noise correlations on the Amery Ice Shelf.

In Part II of this thesis, I study teleseismic body waves of earthquakes for source parameters or near-source structure. With the dense modern global network and improved methodologies, I obtain high-resolution earthquake locations, focal mechanisms and rupture processes, which provide critical insights to earthquake faulting processes in shallow and deep parts of subduction zones. Waveform modeling of relatively simple subduction zone events also displays new constraints on the structure of subducted slabs.

In summary, behind my approaches to the relatively independent problems, the philosophy is to bring observational insights from seismic waveforms in critical and simple ways.