The life history and ecology of black scabbardfish (Aphanopus carbo Lowe 1839) in the north-east Atlantic

The black scabbardfish is a deep water species that supports commercial fisheries across a large area of the NE Atlantic shelf. The life history of black scabbardfish is poorly understood and a major unresolved issue is population structure. In this study it was used a combination of methodologies to get further knowledge in the life history and population structure of A. carbo over its wide distribution range in the Northeast Atlantic. The new knowledge acquired during this study, will increase our ability to better manage this species in the NE Atlantic. It has been postulated that fish caught to the west of the British Isles are pre-adults that migrate further south (to Madeira) for spawning, implying a single panmictic population. In this study, specimens of Aphanopus carbo were sampled between September 2008 and May 2010 from two different areas: NW Scotland (French trawlers and deep water surveys) and Madeira Islands (longliners commercial landings). Geographical differences in reproductive state of scabbardfish were evident, supportive of a north-south migration theory. In the northern area, all specimens found were immature, while in Madeira all maturity stages were observed. In Madeira, spawning occurred during the fourth quarter, with peak maturity in October (males) and in November (females). The age of this species has proven difficult and has led to different and contradictory age and growth estimates. For this study, we used two reading interpretations to determine age and estimate the growth parameters. To the west of the British Isles, specimens reached a lower maximum age and had a higher growth rate than those caught off Madeira. These differences are consistent with the theory of a single population of black scabbardfish in the NE Atlantic, highly segregate, with smaller, immature and younger fish caught to the west of the British Isles and bigger and mature caught in Madeira Islands. The feeding ecology showed strong evidence that the diet of black scabbardfish is associated with the spawning migration of blue whiting, which may support a northerly feeding migration theory for black scabbardfish. The stable isotope analyses in the muscle of black scabbardfish identified that black scabbardfish feeds on species with epipelagic and benthopelagic affinities. Comparison with stable isotope analysis in Madeira samples indicated that black scabbardfish feed at a similar trophic level and has the same trophic niche width in both areas, assuming similar baseline isotope compositions. Otolith stable isotopes (oxygen - δ18O and nitrogen - δ15N) analyses were used as a tool to clarify migratory behaviour. Otolith isotope ratios can provide insight into whether adults caught around Madeira fed in an isotopically depleted northerly ecosystem (NW Scotland) during their pre-adult period and then migrate towards south to spawn. Overall, the results support a south-north migration of pre adult fish from spawning areas around Madeira and a north-south migration from the west of Scotland to the spawning areas. Given its life cycle there is an urgent need that the management process recognizes the existence of a continuous widely distributed stock of black scabbardfish between the west of the British Isles and Madeira. The results highlight large scale dispersal in this species which needs to be treated as a highly migratory species and be managed as a single population.

The Islamic commercial crisis: Institutional roots of economic underdevelopment in the Middle East

During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likelihood of premature dissolution. The upshot is that European enterprises grew larger than those of the Islamic world. Moreover, while ever larger enterprises propelled further organizational transformations in Europe, persistently small enterprises inhibited economic modernization in the Middle East.

Neutralization activity in a geographically diverse East London cohort of human immunodeficiency virus type 1-infected patients: clade C infection results in a stronger and broader humoral immune response than clade B infection.

The array of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) subtypes encountered in East London, an area long associated with migration, is unusually heterogeneous, reflecting the diverse geographical origins of the population. In this study it was shown that viral subtypes or clades infecting a sample of HIV type 1 (HIV-1)-positive individuals in East London reflect the global pandemic. The authors studied the humoral response in 210 treatment-naïve chronically HIV-1-infected (>1 year) adult subjects against a panel of 12 viruses from six different clades. Plasmas from individuals infected with clade C, but also plasmas from clade A, and to a lesser degree clade CRF02_AG and CRF01_AE, were significantly more potent at neutralizing the tested viruses compared with plasmas from individuals infected with clade B. The difference in humoral robustness between clade C- and B-infected patients was confirmed in titration studies with an extended panel of clade B and C viruses. These results support the approach to develop an HIV-1 vaccine that includes clade C or A envelope protein (Env) immunogens for the induction of a potent neutralizing humoral response.

Climate change, water resources, and the politics of adaptation in the Middle East and North Africa

Through an examination of global climate change models combined with hydrological data on deteriorating water quality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), we elucidate the ways in which the MENA countries are vulnerable to climate-induced impacts on water resources. Adaptive governance strategies, however, remain a low priority for political leaderships in the MENA region. To date, most MENA governments have concentrated the bulk of their resources on large-scale supply side projects such as desalination, dam construction, inter-basin water transfers, tapping fossil groundwater aquifers, and importing virtual water. Because managing water demand, improving the efficiency of water use, and promoting conservation will be key ingredients in responding to climate-induced impacts on the water sector, we analyze the political, economic, and institutional drivers that have shaped governance responses. While the scholarly literature emphasizes the importance of social capital to adaptive governance, we find that many political leaders and water experts in the MENA rarely engage societal actors in considering water risks. We conclude that the key capacities for adaptive governance to water scarcity in MENA are underdeveloped. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

SELECTED VARIATIONS BY COMPOSERS IN GERMANY AND FRANCE

The Haward of Dictionary of Music (1983), defines variation as "a technique modifying a given musical idea." From the Baroque period on, the form and the techniques of variation were developed and enriched in Germany and France. Therefore, I presented the works of composers from these two nations. Even though there was a vast number of possibilities, I wanted to be scholastically fair and interesting in making my selections by choosing well-known pieces along with lesser-known ones. Haydn's well-known Variations in F minor consist of two sets of double variations which break into an improvisation fantasy. The first movement of Beethoven Sonata in A flat major, Op. 26, is a set of five variations on the composer's original theme. The variations are positioned in the first movement instead of Sonata-Allegro form. In 1861 Brahrns composed the Variations and Fugue, Op. 24, on the theme of Handel. Brahms displays a wealth of rhythmic, harmonic and textural contrasts in the variations. Chopin's E Major Variations without opus number are written on a Swiss influenced German folksong. Faure's Theme and Variations in C sharp minor, Op. 73, includes eleven variations. The work displays the composer's subtlety, grace and reticence. 12 Variationen iiber ein eigenes Thema were written by Alban Berg as a composition study with Schonberg. The Finale of Dutilleux's Piano Sonata, titled "Chorale with Variations", is written in an impressionistic style. A rich expressiveness is well blended in a classical form. In 1742, the remarkable Aria and thirty variations known as the Goldberg Variations were composed by J. S. Bach. The thirty Variations are unified by the bass line, which forms the foundation of the Aria. The pieces discussed above were presented in three recitals. Compact disc recordings of these recitals are available in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland.

Regulating the Ocean: Piracy and Protection along the East African Coast

From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region.

This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast.

Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.

To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.

The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy.

Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.

Contracting Freedom: Governance and East Indian Indenture in the British Atlantic, 1838-1917

This is a dissertation about identity and governance, and how they are mutually constituted. Between 1838 and 1917, the British brought approximately half a million East Indian laborers to the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations. The dissertation argues that contrary to previous historiographical assumptions, indentured East Indians were an amorphous mass of people drawn from various regions of British India. They were brought together not by their innate "Indian-ness" upon their arrival in the Caribbean, but by the common experience of indenture recruitment, transportation and plantation life. Ideas of innate "Indian-ness" were products of an imperial discourse that emerged from and shaped official approaches to governing East Indians in the Atlantic. Government officials and planters promoted visions of East Indians as "primitive" subjects who engaged in child marriage and wife murder. Officials mobilized ideas about gender to sustain racialized stereotypes of East Indian subjects. East Indian women were thought to be promiscuous, and East Indian men were violent and depraved (especially in response to East Indian women's promiscuity). By pointing to these stereotypes about East Indians, government officials and planters could highlight the promise of indenture as a civilizing mechanism. This dissertation links the study of governance and subject formation to complicate ideas of colonial rule as static. It uncovers how colonial processes evolved to handle the challenges posed by migrant populations.

The primary architects of indenture, Caribbean governments, the British Colonial Office, and planters hoped that East Indian indentured laborers would form a stable and easily-governed labor force. They anticipated that the presence of these laborers would undermine the demands of Afro-Creole workers for higher wages and shorter working hours. Indenture, however, was controversial among British liberals who saw it as potentially hindering the creation of a free labor market, and abolitionists who also feared that indenture was a new form of slavery. Using court records, newspapers, legislative documents, bureaucratic correspondence, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts from archives and libraries in Britain, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this dissertation explores how indenture was envisioned and constantly re-envisioned in response to its critics. It chronicles how the struggles between the planter class and the colonial state for authority over indentured laborers affected the way that indenture functioned in the British Atlantic. In addition to focusing on indenture's official origins, this dissertation examines the actions of East Indian indentured subjects as they are recorded in the imperial archive to explore how these people experienced indenture.

Indenture contracts were central to the justification of indenture and to the creation of a pliable labor force in the Atlantic. According to English common law, only free parties could enter into contracts. Indenture contracts limited the period of indenture and affirmed that laborers would be remunerated for their labor. While the architects of indenture pointed to contracts as evidence that indenture was not slavery, contracts in reality prevented laborers from participating in the free labor market and kept the wages of indentured laborers low. Further, in late nineteenth-century Britain, contracts were civil matters. In the British Atlantic, indentured laborers who violated the terms of their contracts faced criminal trials and their associated punishments such as imprisonment and hard labor. Officials used indenture contracts to exploit the labor and limit the mobility of indentured laborers in a manner that was reminiscent of slavery but that instead established indentured laborers as subjects with limited rights. The dissertation chronicles how indenture contracts spawned a complex inter-imperial bureaucracy in British India, Britain, and the Caribbean that was responsible for the transportation and governance of East Indian indentured laborers overseas.

EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY VIOLA MUSIC FROM ENGLAND AND GERMANY: FROM POST-ROMANTICISM TO MODERNISM

In the early twentieth century, the viola began to gain status as a solo instrument with the appearance in England of the virtuosic violist Lionel Tertis. Because of a lack of music for viola at that time, such English composers as York Bowen, Arnold Bax, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss and William Walton began to write viola music for Tertis. Meanwhile, in Germany, the well-known composer and virtuosic violinist and violist Paul Hindemith wrote and premiered several viola sonatas and concertos. Viola music became even more developed later with William Primrose, the legendary Scottish violist, and all the works written in the early twentieth century have remained significant in the viola literature. Although this new viola music appeared in both countries during same period, it developed along different lines in each country. Because they were under the influence of earlier periods and traditions, the English composers who associated with Tertis wrote their music in a Romantic style, with expanded harmony, various colors of sound and timbre, and lyrical melodies. Hindemith, as a composer himself, employed a more Modernist style, using atonality and angular melodies, which represented German trends at that time. I have given three recitals, of which the first two were divided between selected English music and German music. Although I originally intended to focus solely on music by Hindemith and music written for Terts, I decided that in order to give a more complete view of the national trends of those two countries, I included Rebecca Clarke's Sonata, Lachrymae by Benjamin Britten (dedicated to William Primrose), and Max Reger's Suite for Viola. Rebecca Clarke was herself a fine violist, and her sonata's Romantic style is also representative of the English trends of viola music. Lachrymae was written with a different concept and shows more modernity than had ever before occurred in England, though it still differs from the modernity of other countries. Max Reger's Suite is in a truly Romantic style, yet it is old fashioned in ways that differ not only from Wagner or Strauss, but also from English music of the period. In my last recital I wished to pay homage to Tertis, with a program consisting entirely of music written for him. For the finale, Arthur Bliss's Viola Sonata was especially chosen because it provides interesting similarities and contrasts with earlier English music in the Romantic style.

The East Asian Collection at Duke University: Dynamics of Change.

Traces the history of Duke's East Asian Studies program and associated library collections from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Describes the strengths of the Japanese, Chinese and Korean collections, materials in special collections and cooperation with the University of North Carolina.

Epidemiological study of oesophageal and gastric cancer in south-east England

Background: This epidemiological study was carried out to establish the magnitude of the changing incidence of gastric and oesophageal cancer. Methods: Time-trend analyses of subsite-specific cancers of the oesophagus and stomach were performed using data from the Thames Cancer Registry database (1960-1996) for the South Thames Region. The changes in sex ratio and peak age of incidence are reported. Results: In the upper two-thirds of the oesophagus there was no significant change in the incidence rate, but the lower third of the oesophagus showed a marked rise for both sexes (average annual change + 0.05 for men, + 0.009 for women). For the gastric cardia, the incidence in males increased (average annual change + 0.025), while in females it remained unchanged. Cancers of the oesophagogastric junction showed a clear increase for both sexes (average annual change + 0.07 for men, + 0.009 for women). There were changes in the sex ratio and peak age of incidence for all subsite cancers for both sexes. Conclusion: Over a 37-year period the incidence of cancer of the oesophagogastric junction increased threefold, while the incidence of cancers of the other subsites of the stomach decreased. Further studies are needed to investigate the aetiology of these changes.

First report of the occurence of East African cassava mosaic virus-Uganda (EACMV-UG) in Angola

No abstract is available for this article.

South East London Palliative and End of Life Care Education and Training Strategy: Meeting the Education and Training Needs of the Health & Social Care Workforce Involved in the Care of Patients and Carers at the End of Life.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Aims 1. The aims of this strategy are • to ensure that a full range of education and training related to the adult end of life care pathway is available across South East London to meet the needs of our health and social care workforce • to enable those responsible for end of life care education and training commissioning to procure comprehensively from a full range of education providers in a systematic and strategic manner. Background 2. The work that underpins this strategy was begun by the South East London Cancer Network via its Palliative and End of Life Care Coordinating Group and then developed by way of the Marie Curie Delivering Choice Programme’s Education and Training work stream.