Recommendation domains for pond aquaculture: country case study: development and status of freshwater aquaculture in Malawi

This monograph is a result of a 3-year project to produce a decision-support toolkit with supporting databases and case studies to help researchers, planners and extension agents working on freshwater pond aquaculture. The purpose of the work was to provide tools and information to help practitioners identify places and conditions where pond aquaculture can benefit the poor, both as producers and as consumers of fish. This monograph is the case study for Malawi. Written in three parts, it describes the historical background, practices, stakeholder profiles, production levels, economic and institutional environment, policy issues, and prospects for aquaculture in the country. First, it documents the history and current status of the aquaculture in the country. Second, it assesses the technologies and approaches that either succeeded or failed to foster aquaculture development and discusses why. Third, it identifies the key reasons for aquaculture adoption.

An Extension of Self-Organizing Maps to Categorical Data

Self-organizing maps (SOM) have been recognized as a powerful tool in data exploratoration, especially for the tasks of clustering on high dimensional data. However, clustering on categorical data is still a challenge for SOM. This paper aims to extend standard SOM to handle feature values of categorical type. A batch SOM algorithm (NCSOM) is presented concerning the dissimilarity measure and update method of map evolution for both numeric and categorical features simultaneously.

Pool Boiling in Microgravity: Recent Results and Perspectives for the Project DEPA-SJ10

Two research projects on pool boiling in microgravity have been conducted aboard the Chinese recoverable satellites. Ground-based experiments have also been performed both in normal gravity and in short-term microgravity in the Drop Tower Beijing. Steady boiling of R113 on thin platinum wires was studied with a temperature-controlled heating method, while quasi-steady boiling of FC-72 on a plane plate was investigated with an exponentially increasing heating voltage. In the first case, slight enhancement of heat transfer is observed in microgravity, while diminution is evident for high heat flux in the second one. Lateral motions of bubbles on the heaters are observed before their departure in microgravity. The surface oscillation of the merged bubbles due to lateral coalescence between adjacent bubbles drives it to detach from the heaters. The Marangoni effect on the bubble behavior is also discussed. The perspectives for a new project DEPA-SJ10, which has been planned to be flown aboard the Chinese recoverable satellite SJ-10 in the future, are also presented.

Building an Ocean of Information Drop by Drop : realities of a multi-institutional large scale digitization project

An overview of the workflow process the MBLWHOI Library has created through their digitization efforts with the Internet Archive as the part of two consortial projects. This includes some lessons learned as well as future plans to facilitate access. (21 powerpoint slides)

Bolton Sixth Form College: The springboard project

Mishka Fielding, Learning Resources Manager with the help of Anthony Beal, e-Learning Adviser, RSC Northwest, created a one-hour interactive session to promote Learning Resources and Information Literacy to staff and students within the College. These sessions successfully promoted the department, increasing their stock circulation by 50% and their usage of e-books, putting them 1st out of 200 in the ‘Jisc Collections Project’.

FleSSR project: Sustainable business models for community cloud infrastructure in the UK higher education sector

Cloud-based infrastructure essentially comprises two offerings, cloud-based compute and cloud-based storage. These are perhaps best typified for most people by the two main components of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)1 public cloud offer, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)2 and the Simple Storage Service (S3)3, though, of course, there are many other related services offered by Amazon and many other providers of similar public cloud infrastructure across the Internet.