Environment-friendly practices in the aquafarm

An outline is given of various environment-friendly management practices in aquaculture, considering the following: 1) feed right; 2) avoid antibiotics; 3) reuse and cycle water; 4) use settling or sedimentation ponds; 5) provide mangrove buffer zone; and, 6) practice polyculture or integrated farming.

Towards more sustainable and environmentally-friendly concretes: The use of silica fume

Concrete is the most widely used construction material. At the same time, however, the concrete industry is a major CO2 emitter thus contributing towards global warming. While enhanced efficiency in the production of concrete is not likely to dramatically reduce the CO2 emissions, cement replacement by a supplementary material or mineral additive, such as silica fume, which is not associated with CO2 emission, can substantially reduce the aforementioned problem. The present work discusses the benefits of incorporating mineral additives in concrete and shows that these additives can improve both the mechanical and physical properties of the end-product, and hence its durability, albeit with a reduction in cement content. © 2009 WIT Press.

Environmentally friendly synthesis of highly monodisperse biocompatible gold nanoparticles with urchin-like shape

We report a facile and environmentally friendly strategy for high-yield synthesis of highly monodisperse gold nanoparticles with urchin-like shape. A simple protein, gelatin, was first used for the control over shape and orientation of the gold nanoparticles. These nanoparticles, ready to use for biological systems, are promising in the optical imaging-based disease diagnostics and therapy because of their tunable surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and excellent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) activity.

Structural and Bluish-White Luminescent Properties of Li+-Doped BPO4 as a Potential Environmentally Friendly Phosphor Material

Many efforts have been devoted to exploring novel luminescent materials that not contain expensive or toxic elements, or do not need a mercury vapor plasma source. In this paper, BPO4 and Li+-doped BPO4 powder samples were prepared by the Pechini-type sol-gel (PSG) process. The structure and optical properties of the resulting samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), photoluminescence (PL) excitation and emission spectra, kinetic decay, and X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS), respectively. It was found that PSG -derived Li+-doped BPO4 annealed at 960 degrees C exhibited bright bluish-white emission centered at 416 nm. The luminescence decay curves analysis indicates that each sample has two kinds of lifetimes (5.9 ns and 0.529 ms) and two types of kinetic decay behaviors which can be fitted into a single-exponential function and a double-exponential function, respectively.

Sol-gel-derived BPO4/Ba2+ as a new efficient and environmentally-friendly bluish-white luminescent material

In this paper, BPO4 and Ba2+-doped BPO4 powder samples were prepared by the sol-gel process using glycerol and poly(ethylene glycol) as additives. The structure and optical properties of the resulting samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), diffuse reflection spectra, photoluminescence (PL) excitation and emission spectra, quantum yield, kinetic decay, and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), respectively. It was found that the undoped BPO4 showed a weak purple blue emission (409 nm, lifetime 6.4 ns) due to the carbon impurities involved in the host lattice. Doping Ba2+ into BPO4 resulted in oxygen-related defects as additional emission centers which enhanced the emission intensity greatly (> 10x) and shifted the emission to a longer-wavelength region (lambda(max) = 434 nm; chromaticity coordinates: x = 0.174, y = 0. 187) with a bluish-white color. The highest emission intensity was obtained ;when doping 6 mol % Ba2+ in BPO4, which has a quantum yield as high as 31%. The luminescent mechanisms of BPO4 and Ba2+-doped BPO4 were discussed in detail according to the existing models for silica-based materials.

Insider Outsider issues in researching violence and divided societies

Breen Smyth, M. (2005). Insider Outsider issues in researching violence and divided societies. In E. Porter, G. Robinson, M. Smyth, A. Schnabel, and E. Osaghae (Eds.), Researching Conflict in Africa: Insights and Experiences (pp.9-23). Tokyo: United Nations University Press. RAE2008

Christian education in China : a study made by an educational commission representing the mission boards and societies conducting work in China.

http://www.archive.org/details/christianeducati008935mbp

The Encyclopaedia of missions : descriptive, historical, biographical, statistical : with a full assortment of maps, a complete bibliography, and lists of Bible versions, missionary societies, mission stations, and a general index / edited by Edwin Munsell Bliss.

http://www.archive.org/details/encyclopaediamis02unknuoft

Friendly Virtual Machine: Leveraging a Feedback-Control Model for Application Adaptation

With the increased use of "Virtual Machines" (VMs) as vehicles that isolate applications running on the same host, it is necessary to devise techniques that enable multiple VMs to share underlying resources both fairly and efficiently. To that end, one common approach is to deploy complex resource management techniques in the hosting infrastructure. Alternately, in this paper, we advocate the use of self-adaptation in the VMs themselves based on feedback about resource usage and availability. Consequently, we define a "Friendly" VM (FVM) to be a virtual machine that adjusts its demand for system resources, so that they are both efficiently and fairly allocated to competing FVMs. Such properties are ensured using one of many provably convergent control rules, such as AIMD. By adopting this distributed application-based approach to resource management, it is not necessary to make assumptions about the underlying resources nor about the requirements of FVMs competing for these resources. To demonstrate the elegance and simplicity of our approach, we present a prototype implementation of our FVM framework in User-Mode Linux (UML)-an implementation that consists of less than 500 lines of code changes to UML. We present an analytic, control-theoretic model of FVM adaptation, which establishes convergence and fairness properties. These properties are also backed up with experimental results using our prototype FVM implementation.

TCP-friendly SIMD Congestion Control and Its Convergence Behavior

The increased diversity of Internet application requirements has spurred recent interests in flexible congestion control mechanisms. Window-based congestion control schemes use increase rules to probe available bandwidth, and decrease rules to back off when congestion is detected. The parameterization of these control rules is done so as to ensure that the resulting protocol is TCP-friendly in terms of the relationship between throughput and packet loss rate. In this paper, we propose a novel window-based congestion control algorithm called SIMD (Square-Increase/Multiplicative-Decrease). Contrary to previous memory-less controls, SIMD utilizes history information in its control rules. It uses multiplicative decrease but the increase in window size is in proportion to the square of the time elapsed since the detection of the last loss event. Thus, SIMD can efficiently probe available bandwidth. Nevertheless, SIMD is TCP-friendly as well as TCP-compatible under RED, and it has much better convergence behavior than TCP-friendly AIMD and binomial algorithms proposed recently.