Water quality and zooplankton in tanks with larvae of Brycon Orbignyanus (Valenciennes, 1949)

Devido à importância das condições das variáveis da água e do alimento disponível no desenvolvimento e sobrevivência das larvas de peixes, o objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar o efeito do uso de dois tratamentos alimentares (ração + zooplâncton e somente zooplâncton) e a qualidade da água, em tanques de larvicultura de Brycon orbignyanus. A transparência total da água (45 cm) esteve associada principalmente ao curto tempo de residência, fluxo contínuo e baixa profundidade. As concentrações de oxigênio dissolvido variaram de 1,32 a 7,00 mg.L-1 no tratamento contendo ração + zooplâncton, e de 1,82 a 7,60 mg.L-1 no tratamento contendo somente zooplâncton. Os nutrientes foram diretamente influenciados pela adição de ração no meio com exceção do nitrito. Rotifera apresentou a maior densidade, variando ao longo do período experimental de 8,7 x 10(5) a 1,3 x 10(6) org.m-3 entre os quatro tanques estudados, num total de dez espécies. A menor densidade foi observada para Cladocera, variando de 4,7 x 10(4) a 2,1 x 10(5) org.m-3 num total de seis espécies encontradas, sendo Diaphanosoma birgei a única espécie classificada como muito freqüente. O uso de ração junto com zooplâncton proporcionou melhor rendimento para larvas de B. orbignyanus.

Dynamics of some limnological characteristics in pacu (Piaractus mesopotamicus) culture tanks as function of handling

Visando obter subsídios para um estudo da qualidade da água em tanques de piscicultura, realizou-se um experimento de 166 dias com uma espécie nativa, pacu (Piaractus mesopotamicus). Nos tanques foram testados dois níveis diferentes de proteína na dieta (16% e 34% de proteína bruta) e três densidades de estocagem (0,25; 0,50 e 0,77 peixes/m²). Dos resultados obtidos foi observado que a interação entre a densidade de estocagem e a duração do experimento interferiram nas variáveis bicarbonato e alcalinidade e a interação entre a densidade de estocagem e a porcentagem de proteína interferiram nas concentrações de CO2 livre e total, condutividade e pH (P < 0,05). A temperatura da água nos tanques variou significativamente ao longo do período estudado (P < 0,05), diminuindo gradativamente do verão para o inverno. Não houve diferença significativa no tempo de residência da água nos tanques (P > 0,05) durante a duração do experimento. Os demais parâmetros não sofreram interferência dos tratamentos ao longo do período de estudo.

The legitimation of risk and Bt cotton: a case study of Bantala village in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India

This article explores Ulrich Beck’s theorisation of risk society through focusing on the way in which the risk of Bt cotton is legitimated by six cultivators in Bantala, a village in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, in India. The fieldwork for this study was conducted between June 2010 and March 2011, a duration chosen to coincide with a cotton season. The study explores the experience of the cultivators using the ‘categories of legitimation’ defined by Van Leeuwen. These are authorisation, moral evaluation, rationalisation and mythopoesis. As well as permitting an exploration of the legitimation of Bt cotton by cultivators themselves within the high-risk context of the Indian agrarian crisis, the categories also serve as an analytical framework with which to structure a discourse analysis of participant perspectives. The study examines the complex trade-off, which Renn argues the legitimation of ambiguous risk, such as that associated with Bt technology, entails. The research explores the way in which legitimation of the technology is informed by wider normative conceptualisations of development. This highlights that, in a context where indebtedness is strongly linked to farmer suicides, the potential of Bt cotton for poverty alleviation is traded against the uncertainty associated with the technology’s risks, which include its purported links to animal deaths. The study highlights the way in which the wider legitimation of a neoliberal approach to development in Andhra Pradesh serves to reinforce the choice of Bt cotton, and results in a depoliticisation of risk in Bantala. The research indicates, however, that this trade-off is subject to change over time, as economic benefits wane and risks accumulate. It also highlights the need for caution in relation to the proposed extension of Bt technology to food crops, such as Bt brinjal (aubergine).

Disorderly categories in picture postcards from colonial Papua and New Guinea

At the turn of the century in Melbourne, a notice typed on the verso of a postcard stated that the South Yarra Baptist Young Men's class was meeting on the following Sunday at 2.45 p.m. The card, published in the United Kingdom, was numbered 51828 in the Valentine series of Papuan postcards.1 The image, a photograph of Hanuabada village taken in the early 1880s, and the text, written early in 1900, are contradictory and constitute separate realms of evidence that invite a renegotiation of meaning, analysis, and interpretation of the relationships between images, tourism, colonial rule, and ethnographic knowing. The visual evidence suggests the postcard may have played an ethnographic, educative role in the public understanding of Papua, which had just become an Australian Territory and was not yet well known. It is also suggestive of educative roles related to mission endeavours, subimperialist ambitions and the new tourist traffic through the ports of Port Moresby, Samarai, and Rabaul.

Open Source Enterprise Systems: Towards a Viable Alternative

Enterprise systems are located within the antinomy of appearing as generic product, while being means of multiple integrations for the user through configuration and customisation. Technological and organisational integrations are defined by architectures and standardised interfaces. Until recently, technological integration of enterprise systems has been supported largely by monolithic architectures that were designed, and maintained by the respective developers. From a technical perspective, this approach had been challenged by the suggestion of component-based enterprise systems that would allow for a more user-focused system through strict modularisation. Lately, the product nature of software as proprietary item has been questioned through the rapid increase of open source programs that are being used in business computing in general, and also within the overall portfolio that makes up enterprise systems. This suggests the potential for altered technological and commercial constellations for the design of enterprise systems, which are presented in different scenarios. The technological and commercial decomposition of enterprise software and systems may also address some concerns emerging from the users’ experience of those systems, and which may have arisen from their proprietary or product nature.

‘Beijing bling’: creative details and consumer choices in contemporary China : an interview with Hung Huang

This edited interview with Hung Huang, CEO of China Interactive Media Group (CIMG), was conducted by Lucy Montgomery in Beijing on 12 August 2005. It was done as part of the ARC Discovery research project, Internationalising Creative Industries: China, the WTO and the Knowledge Economy, led by John Hartley. That project is investigating the development of creative industries in China by focusing on a number of creative services including fashion magazines. Huang’s group publishes five fashion magazines in China, including i-Look, Youth International (Qingnian Yizu), which is the Chinese edition of Seventeen (originally founded by TV-Guide mogul Walter Annenberg), and the Beijing and Shanghai versions of London’s Time Out. It also produces TV programs under the same media brands. The company is based in the stylish Bauhaus-designed former factory 798-Space in the district of Dashanzi, Beijing (see www.798space.com). Huang went to school in Greenwich Village and graduated from Vassar College in New York. She is the daughter of Zhang Hanzhi, who was Mao Zedong’s personal English teacher, and stepdaughter of Qiao Guanhua, Foreign Minister of China during the 1970s at the time of the Nixon visit. Her book My Abnormal Life sold 200,000 copies in China.

Digital storytelling as participatory public history in Australia

This chapter discusses digital storytelling as a methodology for participatory public history through a detailed reflection on an applied research project that integrated both public history and digital storytelling in the context of a new master-planned urban development: the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project.

A cluster-randomised intervention trial against Schistosoma japonicum in the Peoples' Republic of China: bovine and human transmission

Background Zoonotic schistosomiasis japonica is a major public health problem in China. Bovines, particularly water buffaloes, are thought to play a major role in the transmission of schistosomiasis to humans in China. Preliminary results (1998–2003) of a praziquantel (PZQ)-based pilot intervention study we undertook provided proof of principle that water buffaloes are major reservoir hosts for S. japonicum in the Poyang Lake region, Jiangxi Province. Methods and Findings Here we present the results of a cluster-randomised intervention trial (2004–2007) undertaken in Hunan and Jiangxi Provinces, with increased power and more general applicability to the lake and marshlands regions of southern China. The trial involved four matched pairs of villages with one village within each pair randomly selected as a control (human PZQ treatment only), leaving the other as the intervention (human and bovine PZQ treatment). A sentinel cohort of people to be monitored for new infections for the duration of the study was selected from each village. Results showed that combined human and bovine chemotherapy with PZQ had a greater effect on human incidence than human PZQ treatment alone. Conclusions The results from this study, supported by previous experimental evidence, confirms that bovines are the major reservoir host of human schistosomiasis in the lake and marshland regions of southern China, and reinforce the rationale for the development and deployment of a transmission blocking anti-S. japonicum vaccine targeting bovines.

My place through my eyes : a social constructionist approach to researching the relationships between socioeconomic living contexts and physical activity

There is a growing evidence-base in the epidemiological literature that demonstrates significant associations between people’s living circumstances – including their place of residence – and their health-related practices and outcomes (Leslie, 2005; Karpati, Bassett, & McCord, 2006; Monden, Van Lenthe, & Mackenbach, 2006; Parkes & Kearns, 2006; Cummins, Curtis, Diez-Roux, & Macintyre, 2007; Turrell, Kavanagh, Draper, & Subramanian, 2007). However, these findings raise questions about the ways in which living places, such as households and neighbourhoods, figure in the pathways connecting people and health (Frolich, Potvin, Chabot, & Corin, 2002; Giles-Corti, 2006; Brown et al, 2006; Diez Roux, 2007). This thesis addressed these questions via a mixed methods investigation of the patterns and processes connecting people, place, and their propensity to be physically active. Specifically, the research in this thesis examines a group of lower-socioeconomic residents who had recently relocated from poorer suburbs to a new urban village with a range of health-related resources. Importantly, the study contrasts their historical relationship with physical activity with their reactions to, and everyday practices in, a new urban setting designed to encourage pedestrian mobility and autonomy. The study applies a phenomenological approach to understanding living contexts based on Berger and Luckman’s (1966) conceptual framework in The Social Construction of Reality. This framework enables a questioning of the concept of context itself, and a treatment of it beyond environmental factors to the processes via which experiences and interactions are made meaningful. This approach makes reference to people’s histories, habituations, and dispositions in an exploration between social contexts and human behaviour. This framework for thinking about context is used to generate an empirical focus on the ways in which this residential group interacts with various living contexts over time to create a particular construction of physical activity in their lives. A methodological approach suited to this thinking was found in Charmaz’s (1996; 2001; 2006) adoption of a social constructionist approach to grounded theory. This approach enabled a focus on people’s own constructions and versions of their experiences through a rigorous inductive method, which provided a systematic strategy for identifying patterns in the data. The findings of the study point to factors such as ‘childhood abuse and neglect’, ‘early homelessness’, ‘fear and mistrust’, ‘staying indoors and keeping to yourself’, ‘conflict and violence’, and ‘feeling fat and ugly’ as contributors to an ongoing core category of ‘identity management’, which mediates the relationship between participants’ living contexts and their physical activity levels. It identifies barriers at the individual, neighbourhood, and broader ecological levels that prevent this residential group from being more physically active, and which contribute to the ways in which they think about, or conceptualise, this health-related behaviour in relationship to their identity and sense of place – both geographic and societal. The challenges of living well and staying active in poorer neighbourhoods and in places where poverty is concentrated were highlighted in detail by participants. Participants’ reactions to the new urban neighbourhood, and the depth of their engagement with the resources present, are revealed in the context of their previous life-experiences with both living places and physical activity. Moreover, an understanding of context as participants’ psychological constructions of various social and living situations based on prior experience, attitudes, and beliefs was formulated with implications for how the relationship between socioeconomic contextual effects on health are studied in the future. More detailed findings are presented in three published papers with implications for health promotion, urban design, and health inequalities research. This thesis makes a substantive, conceptual, and methodological contribution to future research efforts interested in how physical activity is conceptualised and constructed within lower socioeconomic living contexts, and why this is. The data that was collected and analysed for this PhD generates knowledge about the psychosocial processes and mechanisms behind the patterns observed in epidemiological research regarding socioeconomic health inequalities. Further, it highlights the ways in which lower socioeconomic living contexts tend to shape dispositions, attitudes, and lifestyles, ultimately resulting in worse health and life chances for those who occupy them.

Radiological aspects of petroleum exploration and production in the sultanate of Oman

This thesis is a study of naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) activity concentration, gamma dose rate and radon (222Rn) exhalation from the waste streams of large-scale onshore petroleum operations. Types of activities covered included; sludge recovery from separation tanks, sludge farming, NORM storage, scaling in oil tubulars, scaling in gas production and sedimentation in produced water evaporation ponds. Field work was conducted in the arid desert terrain of an operational oil exploration and production region in the Sultanate of Oman. The main radionuclides found were 226Ra and 210Pb (238U - series), 228Ra and 228Th (232Th - series), and 227Ac (235U - series), along with 40K. All activity concentrations were higher than the ambient soil level and varied over several orders of magnitude. The range of gamma dose rates at a 1 m height above ground for the farm treated sludge had a range of 0.06 0.43 µSv h 1, and an average close to the ambient soil mean of 0.086 ± 0.014 µSv h 1, whereas the untreated sludge gamma dose rates had a range of 0.07 1.78 µSv h 1, and a mean of 0.456 ± 0.303 µSv h 1. The geometric mean of ambient soil 222Rn exhalation rate for area surrounding the sludge was mBq m 2 s 1. Radon exhalation rates reported in oil waste products were all higher than the ambient soil value and varied over three orders of magnitude. This study resulted in some unique findings including: (i) detection of radiotoxic 227Ac in the oil scales and sludge, (ii) need of a new empirical relation between petroleum sludge activity concentrations and gamma dose rates, and (iii) assessment of exhalation of 222Rn from oil sludge. Additionally the study investigated a method to determine oil scale and sludge age by the use of inherent behaviour of radionuclides as 228Ra:226Ra and 228Th:228Ra activity ratios.